A BAILOUT FOR THE REST OF US

America is on the verge of a cataclysmic economic disaster. In the last few days trillions of dollars have been wiped out in the stock market, credit markets have tightened, and the average American has sunk deeper into debt. Congress is reluctant to spend $700 billion to stabilize the markets and economists fear that even such a massive infusion of cash will not solve the underlying economic issues. The experts scrounging over the details of the bailout package are gifted economists, but they have failed to grasp a basic aspect of the problem. The trillions of dollars lost in the stock market, the $700 billion the government wants to spend to fix the problem, and the trillions of dollars in debt that started this problem exist only on paper. Nothing tangible has been lost.

A paper problem requires a paper solution. It is time for America to employ a strategy which successfully financed the Revolutionary and the Civil wars. With the $700 billion Congress plans to spend to bailout the Wall Street speculators that caused this problem they should bail out the common people. For a cost of $1 the government can print $2,400. For an investment of a mere $700 billion in printing presses and paper, the Treasury could send each American a check for $6,700,000. This is an instant solution to our nation’s financial difficulties. Thousands of unemployed printers will find work, stock prices and home values will skyrocket as the average American becomes a member of the upper class, the liquidity crisis will end as the markets burst with cash, the bad loans that led to the present situation will be paid off, and so will our national debt.

There will be some who say that this will cause inflation, but the word inflation is only a dysphemism for an investment opportunity. History makes clear that citizens prosper with this plan. When this system was experimented with on a smaller scale in America a wagon full of supplies was worth a wagon full of money. In pre-Nazi Germany, there are famous images of everyday Germans made so affluent by this plan that they burned money to heat their homes. Today, under the guidance of President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, the implementation of a similar economic policy has created the highest per-capita number of billionaires anywhere in the world. The most successful implementation of this policy, though, came in Hungary in 1946. Economist Thomas Pittenger reports that wages rose by over four quintillion percent during a particularly prosperous month in Hungary. Even common factory workers were paid four times a day with wheelbarrows full of money and while a return that impressive might not materialize in the U.S the example set by Hungary in the wake of World War II serves as a powerful testament to the benefits of this plan.
Congress does not need to worry about where to find the predicted $700 billion it will take to repair the economy. That is a paltry sum in an economy that could and should be booming with an influx of quadrillions of dollars. Unlike the version proposed in Congress this bailout plan will cost nothing, benefit the common people, and address the root cause of the economic problem: a lack of liquidity.