Letter to President Obama #18 | Subject: Ideas for the Economy
Letter to President Obama #18 | Subject: Ideas for the Economy and A Note about Birds
Dear President Obama,
I’ve got a few suggestions about the economy that I think might help the administration.
First of all, I’m in the process of buying my first home, and I was really excited to learn about the $8,000 tax rebate for first-time home buyers. I’ve been thinking about opening a small business with that money, and I learned of this business venture from a cartoon, The Duck Tales.
As you may recall, in The Duck Tales, Scrooge McDuck has a large vault in which he keeps all of his money. The vault is so full of coins that it’s a de facto swimming pool. Not surprisingly, Mr. McDuck (who is the uncle of Donald) is often shown swimming in his vault.
Ever since I saw The Duck Tales, I’ve wanted to swim in a pool of money too. So I did some calculations, and I was disappointed to find that even if I were to receive all of my tax rebate in pennies, I’d only be able to fill a 1,000-gallon aquarium. Needless to say, I couldn’t swim in that, Mr. President; I’m not a fish.
Nevertheless, I’ve been reading about the bank bailouts, and I’m pretty sure that the Treasury Department has enough money to make an Olympic-sized pool of money happen. By my calculations, all we’d need is about 39 million dollars in pennies! And Mr. President, please don’t think that this money would go to waste. I’m pretty sure that there are other people like me. If my hunch is correct, we could even market it as a tourist attraction and charge an entrance fee!
Of course, we’d have to take precautions against theft, and the “penny-dives” so popular with children at other pools would necessarily have to be frowned upon. In addition, I’ve read that money has a lot of germs on it, as well as traces of illicit drugs and even fecal matter (eew!), so we’d probably want to disinfect it. If these money pools were popular enough, we could open money pools all over the place, and the entrance fees could help us pay down the deficit.
And as far as marketing, we could probably get Scrooge McDuck to be the mascot, but I’d strongly advise against making a real duck, or any live bird, the mascot. Let me explain: While I’m an ardent fan of cartoon birds, I’m ambivalent about actual birds. They’re too noisy.
That becomes pretty clear when one goes camping—but birds can even be noisy indoors. For Father’s Day one year, we got my grandfather this bird clock that makes different bird calls at the top of every hour. So at noon you’d hear a cardinal calling and so on. That’s all well and good, but the clock keeps making sounds at night too. You know, when people sleep!
And I don’t know why, but they picked the most terrifying birds possible for the middle of the night. Haunting, brooding birds, like the loon and the raven. (Right, like I want to be thinking about Edgar Allen Poe at 3 AM.) I mean, aren’t there any quiet birds? I would have been fine if they’d picked a ninja bird or a mime bird, or a bird known predominantly for its skills with American Sign Language.
In the end, that was manageable; we just avoided the bird room at night. Later, when we got him a locomotive clock, things got totally out of hand. Of course, we put it in the same room, not wanting to sacrifice another room to a noisy clock. So every day at noon, the cardinal would start chirping and then it would be overwhelmed by the sound of a Canadian Pacific train engine. To make it fair, we turned up the bird clock so the cardinal would have a chance. The result was pandemonium, let me tell you. If I had an enemy and they were staying the night, I’d make them sleep in that room.
Anyway, I’m telling you all this because I think these clocks might be useful for the U.S. government. I can think of a number of important jobs that require people to stay up at night (air traffic controllers, pilots, soldiers), and these clocks could help.
For instance, we could get each air traffic control tower about six of these. There’s no way the air traffic controllers would fall asleep then, as they’d be jarred awake every hour by the dueling sounds of our feathery friends and tons of heavy machinery. Sure, they’d probably hate birds and trains, but hey, we’re not paying them to be ornithologists or engineers.
In any case, let me know what you think about these ideas.
Thanks, and take care.
Brett Ortler
P.S. This is letter #18 to President Obama. I'm writing and sending one a day. See the rest at www.knockoutlit.org/brett.html
Dear President Obama,
I’ve got a few suggestions about the economy that I think might help the administration.
First of all, I’m in the process of buying my first home, and I was really excited to learn about the $8,000 tax rebate for first-time home buyers. I’ve been thinking about opening a small business with that money, and I learned of this business venture from a cartoon, The Duck Tales.
As you may recall, in The Duck Tales, Scrooge McDuck has a large vault in which he keeps all of his money. The vault is so full of coins that it’s a de facto swimming pool. Not surprisingly, Mr. McDuck (who is the uncle of Donald) is often shown swimming in his vault.
Ever since I saw The Duck Tales, I’ve wanted to swim in a pool of money too. So I did some calculations, and I was disappointed to find that even if I were to receive all of my tax rebate in pennies, I’d only be able to fill a 1,000-gallon aquarium. Needless to say, I couldn’t swim in that, Mr. President; I’m not a fish.
Nevertheless, I’ve been reading about the bank bailouts, and I’m pretty sure that the Treasury Department has enough money to make an Olympic-sized pool of money happen. By my calculations, all we’d need is about 39 million dollars in pennies! And Mr. President, please don’t think that this money would go to waste. I’m pretty sure that there are other people like me. If my hunch is correct, we could even market it as a tourist attraction and charge an entrance fee!
Of course, we’d have to take precautions against theft, and the “penny-dives” so popular with children at other pools would necessarily have to be frowned upon. In addition, I’ve read that money has a lot of germs on it, as well as traces of illicit drugs and even fecal matter (eew!), so we’d probably want to disinfect it. If these money pools were popular enough, we could open money pools all over the place, and the entrance fees could help us pay down the deficit.
And as far as marketing, we could probably get Scrooge McDuck to be the mascot, but I’d strongly advise against making a real duck, or any live bird, the mascot. Let me explain: While I’m an ardent fan of cartoon birds, I’m ambivalent about actual birds. They’re too noisy.
That becomes pretty clear when one goes camping—but birds can even be noisy indoors. For Father’s Day one year, we got my grandfather this bird clock that makes different bird calls at the top of every hour. So at noon you’d hear a cardinal calling and so on. That’s all well and good, but the clock keeps making sounds at night too. You know, when people sleep!
And I don’t know why, but they picked the most terrifying birds possible for the middle of the night. Haunting, brooding birds, like the loon and the raven. (Right, like I want to be thinking about Edgar Allen Poe at 3 AM.) I mean, aren’t there any quiet birds? I would have been fine if they’d picked a ninja bird or a mime bird, or a bird known predominantly for its skills with American Sign Language.
In the end, that was manageable; we just avoided the bird room at night. Later, when we got him a locomotive clock, things got totally out of hand. Of course, we put it in the same room, not wanting to sacrifice another room to a noisy clock. So every day at noon, the cardinal would start chirping and then it would be overwhelmed by the sound of a Canadian Pacific train engine. To make it fair, we turned up the bird clock so the cardinal would have a chance. The result was pandemonium, let me tell you. If I had an enemy and they were staying the night, I’d make them sleep in that room.
Anyway, I’m telling you all this because I think these clocks might be useful for the U.S. government. I can think of a number of important jobs that require people to stay up at night (air traffic controllers, pilots, soldiers), and these clocks could help.
For instance, we could get each air traffic control tower about six of these. There’s no way the air traffic controllers would fall asleep then, as they’d be jarred awake every hour by the dueling sounds of our feathery friends and tons of heavy machinery. Sure, they’d probably hate birds and trains, but hey, we’re not paying them to be ornithologists or engineers.
In any case, let me know what you think about these ideas.
Thanks, and take care.
Brett Ortler
P.S. This is letter #18 to President Obama. I'm writing and sending one a day. See the rest at www.knockoutlit.org/brett.html
Labels: bailout, birds, economy, funny, joke, letters to the president, money, pennies, politics, the duck tales
posted by brett at
9:07 PM
2 Comments:
My dearest Mr. Ortler, esq. IV;
As a scientist and an engineer I must admonish your latest idea to stimulate the economy. The main objection, as I perceive it, is how you devise on the pool clean? If you require an induction to this issue I advise you to decamp to your most proximate Chuck E. Cheese and behold the ball pit. You will crave the innocence you had before, and wish you had discerned the battlefields of Verdun instead. Resolve this concern and mayhaps you have a respectable idea. For a more rigorous take on this theory please see me in "The General Theory, etc." pp. 128-9: "When involuntary unemployment exists, the marginal disutility of labor is necessarily less than the utility of the marginal product...If this is accepted, the above reasoning show how "wasteful" loan expenditure may nevertheless enrich the community on balance. Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth...". (All emphasis in the original) In conclusion best of health, tally ho, pip, pip, etc., etc..
From the depths of hell I strike at thee,
John Maynard Keynes
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