By BENJAMIN DeCASSERES.
ONE of the symptoms of chronic paranoia is the delusion of a person totally broke that he has vast sums of money and that he can go on indefinitely borrowing and spending without paying back.
A cold-blooded, disinterested ailienist—say from Mars—who should make a cursory examination of the centralized national brain in Washington, or if he merely skimmed the daily papers, would most certainly pronounce us a nation far advanced along the road to paranoia.
The United States has a huge debt, running far into the billions. It has a deficit of billions of dollars. And yet it goes on spending billions of dollars—always BILLIONS, MORE BILLIONS AND MORE BILLIONS.
These billions are raised in taxes, always MORE TAXES, ALWAYS MORE BILLIONS.
Millions of persons not yet born are already being taxed into prenatal poverty to pay for the dementia of our billion-bitten rulers and their congressional servants.
Croesus, king of Lydia, was so rich and powerful that he drew all the wise men of Greece to his court.
Uncle Sam, in the hallucinated visions of our billion-mad representatives, is now Uncle Croesus.
And he, too, has drawn around him all the wise men of the Republic.
They have trooped from the East, South and West, all a-shimmer with degrees and decorations.
Many of them have graduated from four colleges, while others, like Topsy, just growed up into wisdom.
The word BILLIONS, like a star of promise and good news, drew them to the miraculous pork barrel which is in Washington.
Once being in the atmosphere where BILLIONS are spent that do not exist, where BILLIONS are paid out of empty tills and where BILLIONS of taxes are levied on people who are not yet born, they soon came to believe that the one hundred and twenty-five million inhabitants of the United States are nothing but safe deposit vaults to be rifled at will.
And so, like those happy and fantastic persons who live in asylums, they toss away billions of dollars over the breakfast coffee.
This billion-mania is no doubt part of “the more abundant life”—at least for the wise men in and out of Congress who manipulate our destinies.
There is an almighty lift, an airy buoyancy, an expansive feeling of well-being that comes to the great official who can fling billions around from coast to coast which is far greater than the effect of a morning swim or a predinner cocktail.
Our billion complex began during the war. It was our first national taste of colossal spending, colossal taxing and colossal lending.
We flipped billions out of our pocket with the merry ha-ha of a drunken sailor entering a penny arcade with a dime to spend.
We dished up billions for the European countries—those that we fought with, those that we fought against and those that didn’t fight at all—with the superb carelessness of a maharajah who has nothing else to do but to tax the living and unborn to their last rag.
During the boom years following the war we continued on our billion binge with the assurance born of our swelling head.
Those years were the megalomania period of Uncle Croesus’ new life. To talk in millions was bourgeois. To think in thousands was infantile.
We kept lending. We kept spending.
We were open sesame to Europe and to our own people.
In those days a ribbon clerk would throw out his chest when he arrived at the store in the morning and say to the cash girl:
“I see WE appropriated several billions yesterday, and Europe now owes us rah-rah billions.”
The humblest citizen lived on the manna of hallucinating BILLIONS.
Came the dawn—1929.
Did that cure us of the billion frenzy?
No. What was merely megalomania passed into paranoia.
Instead of retrenching, we began to talk bigger billions than ever.
The more definitely Europe repudiates the billions we “loaned” her, the more Uncle Croesus spends.
The deeper we get into a hole, the higher climb the billions.
THE LESS WE HAVE THE MORE WE SPEND.
It’s the greatest paradox of the ages—DEMENTIA PARADOX!
Original publication
Benjamin DeCasseres, “Billion Paranoia,” Syracuse Journal, April 2, 1935, editorial page (number unresolved).