February 6th, 2011
Can The Debt ceiling be raised any more?
The battle continues in Capitol Valley on what to do about The Debt. The Debt, as most people know, is an old ramshackle building next door to the Bizarreville Capitol where all the IOU’s are kept that have stemmed from the rampant mindless government borrowings to fund its wild and crazy spending spree over many years.
In early times, the IOU’s were neatly filed in beautiful oak file cabinets, alphabetized by lender, with an army of secretaries doing the filing in crisp manila folders. As the IOU rate accelerated, the oak cabinets became jammed full, and they had to buy some cheap metal cabinets…later ratcheting down to cardboard cabinets. But, after a while, the incoming IOU’s were just too rapid-fire, so they went with plain old brown boxes. Soon after, when the job of “secretary” was eliminated by Bizarreville courts as being “too demeaning to the soul…a reprehensible exploitation of women…an excuse to have glorified waitresses shlepping coffee for a bunch of lazy suits,” the organized filing simply ceased. IOU’s were just dollied into rooms, closets, and hallways, and dumped helter skelter. Papers were strewn everywhere.
When all the available space was packed as tight as a colon on a no-fiber diet, the Elders determined that the only solution was to raise The Debt ceiling, and add another flat of rooms. That would free up some space in lower floors, so they said, in case anyone wanted to navigate through the mess to pay off a few of the IOU’s. Unfortunately, though, before the next floor was even roughed-in, it began to fill with new truckloads of IOU paperwork, promissory notes being shuttled in continuously. The Bizarreville fathers hurriedly raised the ceiling again, and started construction of another floor. The lack of time for architectural planning or construction oversight caused a few, mostly cosmetic, issues to develop which were corrected with careful gerryrigging.
The Spenders were happy with the solution of adding more and more floors. Sure, the building was ugly, but it was functional, and really that’s all that mattered. The IOU’s were in a place that was mostly dry except in torrential rainstorms. And without secretaries, there was none of the constant whining and bellyaching about crowded conditions, as there had been previously. Curtains were purchased for the windows, drawn closed, so that no one would have to see the mess inside.
The Ceiling raising solution was one that everyone could be happy about…that is, until the Bizarreville Building Engineer finally insisted on an inspection. In his report, he pointed out that The Debt was an unstable, overloaded fire hazard that would likely crash to the ground within 12 months. Naturally, he was fired the next day for his delusional scare tactics, irresponsible analytics, and offensive personal hygiene.
In his aftermath, however, the debate has continued to resound about the quality of the building and structural soundness. Legislators point out that The Debt has become a tourist attraction, especially by foreign visitors who marvel and love to take photographs of it. “The Debt has so much more character than that silly leaning tower in Pisa,” one world traveler commented. “No comparison. This photo is going up in my Rec Room next to a couple Andy Warhol soup cans.”
Rumors have started that maybe Congress would stop their manic hyper-spending, negating the need to raise The Debt ceiling anymore. “Hope not,” another shutterbug answered. “At least not until they add one or two more floors to this wobbly piece of crap.”
Disclaimer: all stories in Bizarreville are fiction, even the ones you would like to be true.
