Originally published at Sultan Knish.
The giant scissors of destiny are clicking and clacking their way to our national credit card. If we don’t raise the debt limit, so we can borrow more money to pay the interest on the money we borrowed before, the scissors will snip and snap like economic Armageddon.And then the big shiny credit card that pays for everything gets cut up in two pieces. But never fear. If worst comes to worst, we still have options.
Our government is big. Really big. So big that the nearly 3 million government employees should be their own state.The population of government employees is already larger than the populations of Rhode Island, Wyoming, Delaware, Alaska, Montana, North and South Dakota, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska and New Mexico. It’s so big that if government employees formed their own state, it would be the 36th largest state in the union.
So why not go for it?
Call it Bureaucratia, its state flag will be a stapler on a manilla background, its nickname will be ‘The Inaction State’, its state bird will be the Ostrich, its state flower will be made of plastic and its entire population will spend all their time in committee meetings to determine a suitably inoffensive state motto, pending that its motto will be, “I’m On Break”.
Under this arrangement, all government employees would be folded into a single state with two senators and the correct number of congressmen, and no more clout than that. And the other 50 states will finally have senators and congressmen working to create jobs for them, instead of jobs for government workers.
The citizens of Bureaucratia will enjoy Universal Free Everything with a 10 year waiting list and 100 percent taxation. And the rest of the country will enjoy keeping their paychecks and living in a place that isn’t bleeding itself dry to subsidize the 36th unknown state in the union.
Of course that’s a long shot. But we still have options. If the debt limit is too stifling for Washington –let’s do what so many schools, churches and libraries do when money is tight.
Let’s have a government sale.
The federal government may have run up a 16.75 trillion dollar debt, but it also has some mighty appealing assets. Like 30 percent of the total territory of the United States. That’s 85 percent of Nevada, 70 percent of Alaska, 60 percent of Utah and 50 percent of Oregon, Idaho, Arizona and California might be worth something on the open market. And some of that 70 percent of Alaska just might have energy reserves that could lower gas prices, which would do more to raise the economy than every stimulus package known to man.
And we don’t have to stop there. Do we really need two Air Force One’s? The Space Shuttle has been scrapped and F-35’s are being cut– but there’s a whole new fleet of Air Force One planes being designed with all the amenities including onboard pharmacies, soft serve yogurt machines and gyms.
The cost of flying Air Force One, 181,000 dollars an hour. Jet Blue offers a $499 ‘All You Can Jet’ pass. For only 500 bucks, the One can fly anywhere he wants to for a whole month.
What about not just saving money, but raising money? We can do that too. Yes we can.
They say Obama is a great speaker. It’s time to put him to the test. Bill Clinton made 10 million dollars delivering speeches in a single year. If Slick Willy got paid an average of $187,000 a night to pack them in, Obama should be able to top him. The country elected a celebrity and it’s time for it to get a cut of the profits.
We can take out an ad in the back pages of the UN Observer offering O speeches at a quarter of a million each. From Berkley to Bangkok, Cairo to Caracas, and Berlin to Brussels, if you’ve got a board meeting, bar mitzvah, 70’s themed disco dance party, memorial, wake or revolution — he will be there to say a few words in style. Have your picture taken with him for only a little extra.
