On Printing Money


The U.S. government is in a financial crisis and leading us off a cliff.

Surprise surprise.

Ron Paul wants to help you do something about it.

Surprise surprise.

Actually, I'm only sorta kidding.

Neither of those are surprising nor particularly true.

They feel true, though. They definitely give us something to talk about. Maybe even debate or argue about. The position will definitely generate lots of user clicks, which as someone who cashes in on user clicks, makes me smile.

But does it make me smile?

I'm not really sure.

This is story is going to be a bit round about, so I won't be particularly hurt if you click somewhere else. I'm still trading pennies at this point.

Anyway, I was searching for something worldly to talk about today and as I was scouring the news for something funny, or tragic that I can spin into funny, I kept coming across the same click-bait article in which Ron Paul (Godfather of the Tea Party Movement) wants to tell me about a horrifying crisis that looms on the horizon and what I can do to protect my family's fortune and health.

I couldn't find anything funny about the terrible deaths on the Mediterranean Sea, or Bruce Jenner's sexual re-orientation, and believe me, I tried . . . so I decided to give Ron a whirl.

I watched the whole 20 minute video. Which would normally lead to a joke about wanting my life back, but let's be honest . . . it's not the dumbest thing I've ever done.

Anyway . . .

He is very concerned.

The US has been printing money like gang-busters, which we all know can lead to the sort of inflation that caused the Great Depression here, and lead to WWII over in Europe.

He didn't mention Nazi's, but he was thinking it.

Printing money out of thin air is a terrible idea.

He's right on that point.

But the chart he kept pointing to showed a staggering increase in money printing since 2006. A chart I couldn't find anywhere else on the internet. Like anywhere else. I don't know where he got the chart, so I can neither confirm nor deny it's validity.

I kept watching anyway.

He talked a lot about being concerned. He talked a lot about his 22 years in the congress. He talked a lot about me needing to take this very seriously. And he talked a lot about that one time he got to take a helicopter ride with Ronald Reagan.

There was an entire scene with him narrating a clip of him holding a hundred dollar bill up to the light. I used to do that too to check for counterfeit bills. It was a good reminder that I hadn't held a hundred dollar bill in a while.

And at 19 minutes and 45 seconds he wanted to sell me a book.

A financial book from the Porter Stansberry Financial Research Group.

The Porter Stansberry Financial Research Group that was indicted and convicted of financial fraud. Can you imagine how terrible you have to be in order to get the SEC to actually do something about you.

Pretty terrible.

But people can change . . . I guess.

The book is only $100 and it's not available on Amazon. I checked. And since I don't have $100 for discretionary spending, I'm not gonna be able to tell you what's in it. You'll just have to buy it yourself.

Okay, all joking aside, I think we can be adults here and just agree that it's a terrible scam for the kind of people the just wanna make good decisions about what to do with the future of their money.

Which brings us round bout to what was really on my mind which one of the subsidiary projects I've been working on, which is satire.

I got a gig writing satirical articles for an online news magazine and have been both successful and having a blast with it.

For instance . . . this blog has generated about 27,000 views over two years. It's a labor of love, but not an income generator.

My first satire post? Over 100,000 views. And by the end of week three, I've gone over 1,000,000.

Not too shabby one might say.

But I put up an article last week that was my most successful to date with 8,000 shares on Facebook and I discovered something that . . . well . . . kinda horrified me.

See, I thought I was being funny. And I was. I can churn out pop-culture humor with the best of them. But the problem with this kind of direct satire is that my most popular work is the stuff that's so close to reality that people don't know it's not real.

I'm riling up people based on their prejudices and fears.

I'm looking for cheap giggles and instead . . . inciting riots.

No . . . I haven't incited a riot. Not even close. So far I've only had one person rage about how terrible my take on a subject was, and three or four people correcting my grammar.

I spelled "The Deer Hunter" as "The Dear Hunter"

The funny part was I did that on purpose.

Couldn't help myself.

Anyway, I'm sort of stuck in the middle. I love writing these things, I can pump out two or three a day if I wanted to, but my success is hinged on how nefariously I defraud the public.

Which makes me feel bad. Not like Ron Paul selling fear and snake oil, but telling lies to generate clicks isn't exactly a nobel effort either.

I haven't an answer for myself yet.  I guess the day will come when my conscience catches up to me, and that will be sooner than later, I can't sleep if I'm feeling amoral.

I might have a pretty bad sense of humor . . . but I've got a pretty good compass . . . and there will always be better ways of making money than just printing it.







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