by Ogelthorpe Q. Sighvatson

Created on: April 01, 2009   Last Updated: April 02, 2009

It's a reasonable question to ask as we stare down the barrel a trillion dollars in Keynesian stimulus spending. However, the wording is all wrong. To ask if the Democrats have gone crazy with America's money is to suggest that just prior to January 20th 2009, there was some great era of fiscal responsibility from the United States government. Such is not the case. Billions of dollars poured into dubious foreign wars (George W. Bush), trillions unaccounted for by the Department of Defense (on Bill Clinton's watch), record spending deficits (Reagan and George HW Bush), the United States government is a notoriously ineffective behemoth.

This can all be traced to the imaginary nature of money in the modern era. Money is worth the paper it is printed on. Considering the fact that even paper money is going out the window as we entrench ourselves in increasingly esoteric financial tools, and you can see that we have building a house of cards for decades on end.

So what is it that gives our money value? Perception. When you hand someone a dollar bill, they have to look at that picture of George Washington, that conspiratorial eye and pyramid icon and the arrow and olive clutching eagle and perceive it to be a legitimate means of exchange. The same thing goes for billions of dollars worth of Treasury Bills sold to foreign governments, who must now look at something which is little more than pixels on a screen and say "Sure! We'll take it!".

Consider this: Where does the money that foreign governments use to buy our debt owed to ourselves as a result of us creating more money using nothing more than the power of our will and little girls' belief in unicorns? They too fabricate money from nothing more tangible than a consensus that the idea is worth something.

This is how the numbers have gotten so big. This is why there are billions of "dollars" floating around the world and the worldwide credit derivitives market alone is estimated to be "worth" $62 Trillion dollars while the word GDP is only around $56 Trillion dollars.

In this world of imaginary money it has for far too long been considered natural in Washington that the government could print money to fund those projects the government wishes to see continued while waving the notion of deficits (about which they never really cared) to cut funding to those projects of lesser importance.

Barack Obama and the Democratically controlled congress find themselves in the unenviable position of being handed the reins of power at a time when the house of cards is at it most precarious point in over 70 years. The Wall Street Meltdown and the Sub-Prime Mortgage crisis have shed light on the derivatives market and much of what it represents. The curtain has been pushed aside a little bit and we are seeing the strings, the mirrors and the smoke machine.

Our country's money and economic policy is indeed crazy by the idealized standards we have been falsely taught the world operates under. At the same time, crazy and sane are defined by a consensus, and for decades this policy was seen as the most natural way of doing business on the world economic stage.

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