Ah, the good old days! Beaver coats, pennants, bootleg hootch down at Mory’s, and the joyous singing of “Boola Boola” as the Yale football team crushed the pantywaists of Fair Harvard. Or got crushed. Who cared?

Well, it’s a century later, but the old fight song still has an eerie resonance. However, that resonance only comes when one substitutes the letter “M” for the letter “B.” The Yalies of the 1920’s were generally the idle sons of the disgustingly wealthy, collecting gentlemen’s C’s in the certain hope of going into Daddy’s investment banking house and making millions.

Millions HAH! I spit on millions!

Back in the 1960’s, Senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, an elderly but still wonderful orator, remarked during a budget debate “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking real money.” He thought he was making a joke, since a billion dollars was a lot of money. Then.

Billions HAH! I spit on billions!

The currency of the day is now TRILLIONS! I know you have read all the glib analyses demonstrating how large a trillion is by telling you how long it would take you to count to a trillion, about how high a pile of hundred dollar bills it would take to make a trillion dollars, etc. While they are somewhat illuminating, they don’t get to the heart of the matter. After all, you don’t generally count your money or pile it up just to gloat over how big the pile is (unless, of course, you are Uncle Scrooge McDuck, in which case you fill your swimming pool with it). No, you SPEND it. You are probably not in the market for fighter bombers or paying the salaries of teacher’s union presidents, so you don’t spend it several billion dollars at a time. But how much could you buy of the really important things? For a trillion dollars you could buy: a trillion Dunkin Donuts; 1,500,000 Lamborghinis; 25 million Priuses (or Prii, I suppose); 200 billion Starbucks mochachinos; thirteen billion pairs of jeans; twelve billion bottles of extremely expensive Scotch; and so on. You get the idea.

So taxes are in the trillions, government expenditures are in the trillions, total mortgage debt is in the trillions, the national debt is in the trillions, we are all in holes so deep we can never clamber out.

Which is actually great! You see, in the old days, an accountant at Sears once figured out a way to take all the fractions of a penny that showed up in the credits for interest on returned merchandise and transfer it to his own account. Since Sears had tens of millions of customers, he collected a tidy sum before he was hauled off to the hoosegow. But now the roundoff isn’t fractions of a penny– it’s fractions of a trillion dollars. So all we need to do is get a job at the data processing department of the Treasury, round off the figures to the nearest trillion, and transfer the remainder to our own account. If we do it once, we will end up with several hundred billion which we can transfer offshore.

Andorra has French food, beautiful people, a pleasant climate, and doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S. What do you say?