Dr Simple Man or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate the Debt Bomb

If the government insists on dragging out cracking the debt conundrum, we're gonna need to expedite the legalization of pot, because that's the only way I'm gonna be able to focus long enough to learn one of the 14 Chinese languages.

Whenever all of the news about this impending debt bomb that we're on the brink of becomes too much for me, I go to a place in my mind where there's a monkey humping a coconut for a few minutes to clear my thoughts, and then I smile and go on to read about a different subject -- like the mating turtles who shut down the runway at JFK airport.

The political pandering over what to do about our mounting debt makes me sick, but at least I've been making an attempt to learn more about this sad subject, which is more than I can say for Vice President Joe Biden, who fell asleep a few months ago during the president's speech on the crisis. If I were the second man in line to push the red button, I'd be awake. I bet Democrats breathed a sigh of relief when they saw the shot of him snoozing away, because when Joe's awake he has a bad habit of talking. Listening to Biden speak is like reading the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies mashup novel. Remember when he called "jobs" a three-letter word? Remember when he told Senator Chuck Graham from Missouri (who is in a wheelchair) to stand up? And let's not forget when he called Candidate Obama "Barack America." It takes me back to when President George W. Bush waved at Stevie Wonder. You don't remember that? Neither does Stevie Wonder.

And who in the Hell thought President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner were going to reach some kind of decision over a game of golf a few weeks ago? Give me a break. Maybe the yuppies in Martha's Vineyard who spent the whole day wearing sweater vests, racing sailboats and sipping Henri IV Dudognon Heritage cognac were waiting with baited breath, but the other 99.999 percent of us knew it was just a smoke grenade. If they really wanted to reach some kind of resolution, they would have traded in their golf clubs for 4-ounce gloves and gone for three 5-minute rounds in the Octagon. Herb Dean would make them throw punches, and if they both refused, he would choke them both out.

Facebook stock has shot up like a rocket.

Sadly, Congressman Ron Paul may be the smartest one of all. Last night it finally dawned on me why he wants to get his grubby old man hands on the gold in Fort Knox: He wants to make sure there's enough there for the government to buy 1 share of Facebook stock on the secondary market and then sell it into the IPO to help pay down our country's debt. But as fast as the secondary market prices for Facebook are rising, I don't know if $160 billion dollars will cut it. I can already feel some people reading this and thinking, "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard." I'll concede, his audit of our gold stash is a bit ridiculous, as it would cost $15 million, and even if we sold all of our gold reserves and not just what was in Fort Knox we'd only rake in roughly $390 billion, which still leaves us with just under $14 trillion dollars in debt that will probably grow to $20 trillion by the time someone reads this crappy column. Perhaps Paul should be beat with a rolled-up version of the president's long-form birth certificate by Donald Trump while The Don is screaming, "Look how this worked out for me, you idiot!", but are you going to tell me it's a worse idea than investing in Citigroup or AIG when we did that? Sure, we can feed a family of four off the Dollar Menu at McDonald's with what we made on Citigroup, but at last check I think we're losing money on our investment in AIG, and if you've been watching tech stocks on IPO day lately (ie, Renren, LinkedIn and Pandora), you'd almost be stupid not to buy shares of them in advance if you can get them and if you can stomach it, and you'd be really stupid not to sell them on the pop within the first two hours and take a nice little gain before the bottom drops out.

But what do I know, I'm just a Simple Man -- who needs to brush up on his Mandarin.