It’s the end of the year. Time for the wasteful, inefficient tradition of exchanging presents. If you disagree, try reading Jeffrey Tucker’s Is Christmas Inefficient?, Bob Murphy’s Putting the Economics Back in Christmas or Joel Waldfogel’s Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays.
Don’t get me wrong; I enjoy getting a good gift. To me, a good gift (assuming it’s tangible), like a good purchase, is something that I value more than the cost of the gift itself. A good gift is something that I would have purchased myself had I known about it. If the gift is something I wouldn’t have bought on my own, then it’s likely that I value the money spent on the gift more than the gift itself. Accordingly, I would have been happier with the money.
As anybody familiar with the holiday tradition knows, in most cases, exchanged gifts between two people should have approximately the same value. It’s this rule that’s put me in an awkward situation. Somebody who I didn’t plan on exchanging gifts with got me something. This something was expensive. Just how expensive? $42,105. A $42,105 gift is very expensive, especially coming from somebody who I didn’t plan on exchanging gifts with in the first place.
Just who spent $42,105 on a gift for me this year? Well it was the generous federal government. The government has “spent, lent or committed $12.8 trillion… The money works out to $42,105 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.” This gift was so generous, that Bloomberg decided to write an article about it!
Like most holiday gifts, it wasn’t something I wanted. In fact, I wish I’d never received it.
So now I’m in an awkward situation. The government spent $42,105 on a gift for me, and I got it nothing in return… and the year is almost over. I did what any prospective gift-buyer does. I snooped around. Trying to find out what the government really wanted, I started searching. On the FAQ’s for the Treasury, down at the very bottom of the page, I finally found it. The government wants more money! Even with the ability to make an infinite amount of worthless green paper, the government still wants more of it. Why? So it can go waste it on something else that we didn’t want in the first place.
The final Frequently Asked Question about the Public Debt:
Q. How do you make a contribution to reduce the debt?
A. Make your check payable to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and in the memo section, notate that it is a Gift to reduce the Debt Held by the Public. Mail your check to:
Attn Dept G
Bureau of the Public Debt
P. O. Box 2188
Parkersburg, WV 26106-2188
So that’s what it wanted all along. As I write a check for $42,105, I wonder how this can possibly be a Frequently Asked Question. I wonder how many people would actually mail the Treasury more money than it already steals. I wonder if anybody has ever used P.O. Box 2188 in Parkersburg, West Virginia. I get my head back together and focus in on the task. I make sure to write a cheery holiday letter. I even throw in some holiday cookies. As I get ready to mail $42,105 to a P.O. Box in West Virginia, I try not to think about how shady a P.O. Box in West Virginia really is. Or even worse, how the government who thinks it can solve problems by throwing money at it, somehow thought it knew what I wanted for the holidays.
