Dave Barry's Money Secrets Read Free

Fathers passed this idea along to the artist hired to do the engraving of the printing plates for the dollar, whose name was Phil. As it happened, the day he did the dollar, which was his birthday, Phil consumed what historians now believe was at least two quarts of whiskey, and for whatever reason—the only explanation he ever gave was “the squirrels made me”—he engraved a pyramid with a giant eyeball on top of it. Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers, who were in a hurry to get the dollar printed so they could spend it, failed to notice this until it was too late. Fortunately, however, they did catch the error on the front of the dollar, where, instead of George Washington, Phil had engraved a fish playing tennis. Otherwise we might live in a very different nation today.

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    HOW THE U.S. ECONOMY WORKS
    Adam Sandler Is Involved
    T HE ECONOMY IS A LARGE, complicated thing that is difficult for regular untrained people like you to understand. Fortunately, in college I took economics for the better part of an entire semester, during which I took time out from my busy schedule to attend several actual classes. So in this chapter I will explain how the economy works, with certain key words in boldface type to indicate that they are darker than the other words.
    The largest single item in the economy is the Gross National Product, or DNA for short. This consists of everything that is produced by the labor force after the labor force finally gets to work and finds a parking space and has some Starbucks. At one time the Gross National Product consisted of both goods and services, but today pretty much all physical objects are manufactured in Asia, which means the U.S. workforce is engaged in the service economy, consisting of 83 million people in cubicles furtively sending and receiving personal e-mails. Also there is a small remaining agriculture sector, consisting of maybe 15 people in Nebraska or someplace who grow soybeans, although nobody knows what they do with them.
    The sum total of the Gross National Product is several trillion dollars, of which one third is sent to the government in the form of taxes for the express purpose of being wasted. Another third goes directly to Bill Gates . The remaining third is divided up into wages and prices, which go up and sometimes, in the case of wages, down, in response to the law of supply and demand, which states that if there are fewer than two outs with runners on first and second base . . . no, sorry, that’s the infield fly rule. The law of supply and demand states that if you have too much of something that not enough people really want, such as movies starring Adam Sandler, the price is going to go down until it reaches $1.99 per DVD; whereas if there is an
under
supply of something, such as whatever toy every child in America including yours wants for Christmas, but the toy manufacturer makes only 25 units of this toy for the entire freaking world, you will pay however much it costs you to get it after trading punches with other parents at Toys Backwards “R” Us.
    If all the prices in the nation go down at once, that is called deflation, and the way to correct it is to wake up from the dream you are having, because this never happens in real life. In real life, all the prices always go up, a condition that economists call inflation, or, for short, normal. If inflation gets to be too bad, Congress holds a hearing at which the nation’s leading economists, using sophisticated data collection and computerized modeling, present a detailed statistical analysis of the economic situation, after which they light a bonfire and sacrifice a live virgin congressional intern.
    The resulting aroma summons Alan Greenspan *   4 , who is the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, a mysterious organization that controls the economy from its secret Batcave-style headquarters far beneath the surface of the earth.
    When Greenspan emerges from the ground, he looks around at the economy to