I won’t tell you to go shopping. They tried that before. You spent your little credit cards till the numbers wore off and then squeezed your house for money and spent, spent, spent. That worked real well. For a couple years.

Now we need to crank up the economy again. Our smart bank guys loaned you so much money that we all went broke spending it. We need a new crank to get things going so we can all be rich guys again.

Some people say the way to go is get a job and make something. But what kind of things do we make here in the old USA. We make music and movies. We make computer games. But you can only sell so many of those. We used to make loans and sell them to just about anyone. That one sure is gone. How about making something you can wear or turn on and watch or just pick up and carry around? We don’t know how to make that stuff anymore.

We do services, not stuff. We do wash-your-pooch, curl-your-hair, mow-your-grass, cook-your-Mac, rub-your-back, paint-your-nails services. Lots of doing. Lots of services. That’s OK, I guess. But we are pretty saturated with services. How much more can you do without getting illegal.

I wish we could still make great stuff like a good fast bicycle or a fancy new kiddee toy or a kitchen seven-in-one mixer or even an old fashioned broom. So I don’t have to always buy stuff from overthere. Overthere is nice, but overhere should be OK too. They say we cost too much to make stuff so we have to use robots or overthere people who work like crazy and don’t like money much. That’s what they say.

I read in the paper today that all the new money is in health! That’s what’s going to crank up the old economy.

So let’s start cranking. Everybody, get sick, right now!

Kickstart those doctors and nurses. Get that health money flowing by sharing some germs and bad habits.

I know we try. We eat fat. We drink our livers blue. We smoke our lungs black. We are not well. But not sick enough to ratchetup the economy. We need a good disease for every red-blooded American. Like a chicken in every pot we need a bunch of microbes in every belly. A virus in every cell. We need some good old fashioned low-grade sicknesses in every home.

We have some bad diseases that you could get. But they kill you quick. We want good diseases that just make you go to the hospital a lot, see a doctor every day, need a nurse, take a bunch of pills, but most of all, let you keep on working your health business job, helping those other sick people. That’s how to make the economy work. Everybody stays sick and goes to see each other for new treatments and meds, paying through the nose with good hard cash.

So where do we get these diseases we need? All the good diseases live down near the equator. Malaria and sleeping sickness keep you hanging on forever and taking pill after pill. They never get cured. They could be a goldmine.

I was going to call on our genetic engineers to fix up those down-south diseases to suit us up-north Americans, but why? We don’t need to do anything this time to be saved. Isn’t it funny how the world works?

Global warming is sending bunches of mosquitoes our way with lots of fancy new diseases in their pointy little snoots. I’m looking forward to that. You should too.

Now, everybody, roll up your sleeves, give them little bugs some blood and, hurray, catch something good for America.

Choice

There are lots of types of choices. We’ve gotten used to choosing between ice cream or pie. That’s easy. Pick one today; pick another tomorrow. Or maybe both today. That’s the choice I like.

But there are really hard choices, like when you choose one thing and it eliminates the other. Marriage is like that. Pick Miss Mary today and say goodbye forever to old Suzy Q. Maybe that’s not a great example with divorce and messing around going on, but you get the idea.

The experts are telling us that we have a big choice coming up that is really, really hard. Either global warming crashes the planet or global slowdown crashes the economy. Either we quit making stuff in order to cut down on carbon or we quit worrying and watch the water rise and the polar bears attack. That’s what they say. A hard choice is just ahead.

But I want an ice cream and pie choice here. I want my globe to chill, but I need my stuff, too. I know it takes a couple trees and a barrel of oil for every 10 minutes I’m alive, but I don’t want to change. I get bored without my stuff. And you don’t want me bored because then I get nasty and make lots of noise.

So you smart-guy scientists need to figure out how to make fun stuff that doesn’t have any carbon in it, doesn’t take any carbon to make, and doen’t use any carbon to carry it to my front door. That´s what we need. Then the choice is easy. Stuff for me and polar bears for everyone, too. So get to work.

I know you scientists are already working on carbon-free stuff. Your fancy video games point the way. A new game uses up about ten days of my life and only uses two cupfuls of oil to make electricity for my computer. A windmill in a light breeze spinning for an hour could power me for a week.

My carbon footprint shrinks to mouse-sized for a month when I have a game that’s interesting. It could stay shrunk forever if great, new games came out every week and (this is important) I didn’t have to go to work and commute burning all that oil in my pickup. So I say it’s work that makes us burn up too much carbon. Because working takes me away from my games and gives me lots of money that I use to go buy useless stuff. Like lava lamps and food processers. I don’t even cook. I just eat. And how much carbon is there in a couple cheeseburgers anyway?

If everyone just stayed home and played video games and partied a lot on weekends or maybe even every other day then who needs to drive big cars. Who needs fancy houses and trucks of designer furniture that comes here in big boats from China. Who needs all that stuff. I just need my chair, my computer and my fridge.

Now, that wasn’t too hard, was it? Maybe I should start working on other things, like world peace and babies that understand bathrooms before they are born. OK, scientists you heard it. Let’s go.