Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 01, 2020

Micro, macro, or freaka?

I used to live in a pretty run-down part of town. Lots of broken glass (and the very occasional whole beer bottle). I always carried a canvas bag and cleaned along the path between my apartment and the nice park that was a few blocks away, just past the rose gardens. I figured that if I had a nickle for every piece of glass I picked up, I’d be able to retire from my regular job…

A billion here a billion there, soon your talking real money!

I agree with Caulfield! If only they gave out money for every brain fart!

When I was a wee lad, it wasn’t uncommon to find pocket change on the street. We’d rush to the corner store and buy penny candy. I wonder what kids do these days? Fewer people use change and don’t get me going on the paucity of penny candy.

I’ve noticed that many people have no idea how much money large sums are – like they don’t get what happens when you add a zero. Somebody wins an early Lotto, and it’s “He only won 20 million dollars.” They don’t realize that the guy is set for life.

A guy said to me the other day, “$500,000 a year isn’t a lot if you live in NYC or San Francisco.” He was serious.

Contentment has never been the foremost human trait.

Don’t worry, Caulfield. In a few decades you will gradually lose hair, memory, and income, and all this will be just a faint outline.

Poo Caulfield. Small amounts of money mystify him.

Some of the degree of understanding of money, whether in large amounts or small, has to do whether you’re talking about your own or other people’s.

we would all be very rich every time we forgot stuff, that we needed to remember…

Given Caulfield’s age – he may not know that much about either large or small amounts of money – so that could be the reason for a difficulty in remembering the topic.

It was either Parkinson’s Law or The Peter Principle that had an anecdote about a board meeting of a large power company that spent about an hour haggling over whether to go with the £120,000,000 or the £130,000,000 option for the new power plant and then an equal amount of time over whether each member’s contribution to the monthly coffee fund should be raised from £5 to £6. The point was that almost nobody had any kind of intuitive feel for what numbers much higher than £50 really meant.

That’s okay guys, most folks can’t handle large and small quantities of Time and Space either. Be grateful you can.

I look at what our government is doing to prop up the economy, and I can only shake my head. They are the fountainhead where the dollars originate, and I can only assume people smarter than me know what they’re doing; but when I see the fed reserve creating trillions out of thin air, then spending it on questionable if not outright junk paper assets, it sets off alarm bells and makes me queasy.

The most important thing to learn about economics is that the more you cut taxes for the rich, the more those tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves. And it’s the Laffer Curve, not the laughter curve, you socialists.

Also, the invasion of Iraq totally paid for itself because oil. (But it was not about oil. It was never about oil.)

And Trump’s deductions were all totally legal and not TAX EVASION. And he is not obese.

…“I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but its weird that it happened twice.”