The United States of America is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but despite that status, they are on the verge of going broke. The Secretary of the Treasury, and part-time Fairy Godmother impersonator, Janet Yellen announced that the U.S. could run out of money by mid-October if the debt limit is not suspended. This prompted many people across the country and world to hop on social media and do what social media does best. Point and laugh at really dumb things.

Money is a very interesting thing to talk about as it only really makes sense to a select group of people who flunk every social aspect of high school in order to pursue a career in being an economist, where 50 percent of the job is being constantly interviewed by national news networks but never really listened to. Money in the United States is even more interesting as it falls into a subgroup of currency known as fiat money. 

Many have learned of fiat money from the rise of cryptocurrency but like usual with anything involved with crypto most people kind of pretend they know what it means while not actually knowing anything about it. Just like crypto, fiat money is a lot simpler than the gravitas the name provides  would suggest, fiat money is just money that does not have intrinsic value or use in  itself. 

For example, gold is valuable because it can be used for specific things like jewelry or really expensive doorstops. US currency really can’t be used for anything outside of purchasing things and isn’t made with anything that would give it value, the government sets and maintains its value. All of this is leading up to one big question, one that has been plastered all over social media feeds in the wake of this serious, albeit pretty comical, story: why can’t we just print more money? 

Inflation schlamation, if we print a lot of money, we’ll have a lot of money. Who cares that fiat money is more susceptible to inflation. Maybe to help out with this “inflation” all these nerds talk about we could print some economically sound coupons. Those couponing moms on TLC’s “Extreme Couponers” seem to be pretty money savvy. Maybe they should be in charge? Every shopping trip should include four carts full of laundry detergent, all in the name of saving this great, but broke, nation.

A GoFundMe was mentioned earlier, maybe that’s not a bad idea. We all love a nice sobering GoFundMe that makes us feel better about the world. Joe Biden walks up to the podium with a big piece of cardstock that has a URL for a GoFundMe, first goal: 20 trillion dollars. America cannot and must not become a country where we brave citizens cannot scrape together our pennies, nickels, and dimes into a fund big enough to pay for a single new, fancy, fighter jet.

This is patriotism, be glad that this country can be honest with itself and ask the UN if it can crash on the couch for a couple of weeks to “figure it out.” Other countries, well, probably would rather not have this problem in the first place, but! That’s what makes us so unique! We love and embrace the fact that we will be the first global superpower to print coupons and become extreme couponers to save our mighty nation. 

The story will be told akin to the tales of General George Washington and his men sailing across the Delaware on a crisp Christmas night, except the boat on the Delaware is our fourth shopping cart and the men we are sailing with are the other three shopping carts filled with various soaps that we thought had cool names, but thanks to our government-issued coupons we will be getting two cents back for every four bottles we purchase because that is and will always be, the American way. And if that all fails we could always just mint a 20 trillion dollar coin.