A friend of my wife forwarded the following ‘Joke’ to her today.  I am sure it is ‘getting around’ and that you may have seen it, but if you haven’t here it is.

It is a slow day in the East Texas town of Woodville.  It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted.  Times are tough, everybody is in debt and everybody lives on credit.  On this particular day a rich tourist from the East is driving through town.  He enters the only hotel in the sleepy town and lays a hundred dollar bill on the desk stating he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to pick one to spend the night.

As soon as the man walks up the stairs, the hotel proprietor takes the hundred dollar bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.  The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to pay his debt to the pig farmer.  The pig farmer then takes the $100 and heads off to pay his debt to the supplier of feed and fuel.  The guy at the Farmer’s Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has lately had to offer her “services” on credit.  The hooker runs to the hotel and pays off her debt with the $100 to the hotel proprietor, paying for the rooms that she had rented when she brought clients to that establishment.  The hotel proprietor then lays the $100 bill back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler from the East walks back down the stairs, after inspecting the rooms.  He picks up the $100 bill and states that the rooms are not satisfactory……  Pockets the money and walks out the door and leaves town.  No one earned anything.  However the whole town is now out of debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.  The joke ends with the statement “That, ladies and gentlemen, is how the United States Government has been conducting business for the past year” and “If that doesn’t scare the heck out of you, then I don’t know what will”.

It is broadly believed that $1 earned results in about $7 of GDP by the time that dollar changes hands multiple times.  If that is true, the foregoing joke could have been extended by two further transactions.  I assume that the author of the joke in his/her conclusion is expressing a concern as to ‘what happens if the rich tourist (aka the U.S. Government) doesn’t show up in town’.  That would be a greater concern if the U.S. government didn’t have a theoretically limitless capacity to print $100 fiat currency ‘Ben Franklins’.  The real concern is assuming the $100 bills are printed and circulated, how much purchasing power will they have going forward - and what will that mean to the standard of living of those accepting and spending them?

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