COLUMN: "Bowling for Zeligs"

From Zelig Kurland's "Bacon for Breakfast," Spring '92 Conventional wisdom: Liberal democrats want to tax everything, and the conservatives want to abolish the subsidies that make SEPTA, surplus dairy products and research at Stanford possible. Neither approach will work. If the liberals win, we'll have no beer money. If the conservatives prevail, no rides to Mainline. The true solution has been overlooked by the politicians and the general football-loving public: if we don't have enough money, print more of it. It's that simple. How did I come up with this? I read a lot. I'm also in the College which, unlike Wharton, has an Econ department. I know Smurfs are five apples high. Conventional wisdom: inflation would skyrocket if we printed piles of cash. I agree, inflation is bad. But America could use the excess dough only to pay off international debts. Then, we stop trading for five years. Stay with me, this is the part where you really have to think: The amount of cash in the U.S. will remain constant, but we won't owe anyone a penny. No debts, no interest, no headaches. We'll have our pork and eat it too: beer money, clean PATCO trains, $500 million airplanes, and $200,000 apple core experiments. Read my lips: no inflation. But a trade moratorium? No Subarus for five years? Deal with it. We can easily go five years without foreign oil, tater tots and semiconductors. Necessities like Drakkar, Aqua-Net and IROC-Z28 fenders can be smuggled in on the black market so Jersey doesn't revolt. We might have to smuggle in some Molson too. The Palladium crowd doesn't realize that drinking expensive imported pis is no classier than drinking cheap domestic pis. Otherwise, suck it up. Buy American. You deserve that Caddie. Will a moratorium hurt the economy? Of course not. No one buys American. The trade ban will only affect those crafty entrepreneurs selling Levi's for $500 to the Japanese. Those are already black market prices anyway. After five years Japan won't figure out what the hell happened, everything will cost the same and we'll have more money. To make things even harder for them to figure out, we can replace the dollar with the Zelig as a unit of currency. Could inflation still rise domestically? No. Refuse to charge or pay more. Be patriotic. Inflation can only happen if you're not looking. Even if Japan figures it out and prices skyrocket, who cares? We'll still have more money. The deficit would seem higher. At a paltry $2 trillion dollars, no one pays attention to it now. Perhaps at $10 trillion Zeligs we could start working it down. Or everybody will be so confused it won't matter. Foreign governments should have been nice enough to forget about our debts anyway. What would happen if we paid off our loans? They'd have too much money. Inflation, degradation, a living hell. To make up for lost interest payments, we could send over surplus Oldsmobiles. Any moron can plainly see that the world's economy would have collapsed years ago if it weren't for Reagan's stupidity. What if Bush isn't excited by this plan? Rendell should go for it -- think of what we can do for Philadelphia: Have the Econ department take over the mint and produce Philabucks (or Zeligs. Whatever . . . ) instead of dollars. When the city uses this new resource to pay its workers, the resulting excess of dollars can be used to pay its debts. Not only will the debt crisis be solved, but the infrastructure and neighborhoods of Philadelphia will be revitalized. City workers returning to New Jersey and Mainline will find their Philabucks useless. They will move back to the city where they belong. Philadelphia will flourish with money that formerly bled into the suburbs. We'll be so rich we can demolish the High Rises and have money left over to donate to Camden -- the place across the Delaware with 200 liquor stores, zero movie theaters and 4000 abandoned homes. But why do that when a cool billion can get you a cool submarine? Sure, this plan is a compromise. We should stop wasting our resources printing and exchanging currency, checks, bills, credit cards, bank statements, money orders, audits, receipts and the like by just plain being nice and giving things to each other. At least, everyone could give stuff to me. I'd do wonders with a billion dollars. Scarcity, after all, is just a figment of your imagination. Zelig Kurland is a sophomore English major from Charleston, West Virginia. "Bacon for Breakfast" appears alternate Tuesdays.