Percy Billinghurst: The fool who sold wisdom. (1900)

"I wonder how our public purse might be influenced
if our billionaire benefactors had ever learned to play Find A Penny, Pick It Up."

The recent injection of multitudes of billionaires into positions affecting the public purse has provided an opportunity to understand better how the very wealthy relate to money. I, the son of parents who grew up through the Great Depression, inherited certain beliefs and practices regarding money. I believe that money is almost impossible to acquire. This belief encourages me to be stingy. I do not seek luxury. I prefer good enough over perfect. I understand that everything costs money and that, mostly, the amount of money stuff costs cannot be meaningfully reduced. Attempting to reduce the cost associated with basic living tends to increase that cost. Trying to eliminate that cost almost always creates catastrophe; the absence of such expenses produces genuine calamity that will cost multiples of whatever was supposed to be saved to recover. I try to be satisfied with what I have, understanding that it's always possible to spend a lot more without gaining an ounce of additional satisfaction. Get-rich-quick schemes tend to be the best way to get poorer quickly.

BIllionaires seem to believe that a penny not spent is a penny somehow liberated from a form of slavery. Every obligation exists as a potential "cost savings," the saving is presumed once the associated expense has been "slashed." (Billionaire budget cutters employ many swordplay metaphors.) Let's say our government, in its wisdom, allocated a few dozen billion dollars to eradicate a specific dread disease in some foreign country. A few dozen billion dollars amounts to an amount most of us civilians cannot imagine. Some explainers will produce some handy visual metaphors to help our imaginations cope. They will show a pile of dollars equal to the size of a familiar volcano and molten lava spewing out the top and flowing down the sides to represent the enormous flow of dollars spent to eradicate that dread disease over there. Eradicating dread diseases does not appear to be a one-time expense. It requires diligence over perhaps decades because dread diseases are tricky and evolutionary. One can make real headway without significantly reducing overall risk, though the local risks tend to improve over time. Until that dread disease is proven eradicated, the defenses must be maintained, for dread diseases can turn on you in a moment of inattention.

Our billionaire budget tenders see those dozens of billions spent on not yet successfully eradicating that dread disease as a spoiled investment. They're impatient investors and classify that expense as regrettably unproductive. They imagine a better return might be realized if they redirected those dozens of billions into another investment. (Their apparent favorite seems to be tax cuts for billionaires, which they seem to believe produce by far the best overall return for society.) Redirecting those dozens of billions eliminates the treatment programs that had been making progress against that dread disease, particularly for those unfortunates who had managed to contract the damned thing and were suffering. Without those treatments, they will undoubtedly die. It's a difficult lesson, I guess, to come to understand that one must contract a dread disease that responds more robustly to friendly government's investments. It's nobody's fault, really, that the treatments had to be cut. It would have been the greater sin to suffer the opportunity cost of continuing to invest in such an unproductive instrument, or so our billionaires said.

The billionaire serves their purpose in this emerging scheme of things, for without them, we might continue funneling the public's money into historically losing investments. That dread disease will most certainly bloom again, though, and given the way we travel these days, it will almost certainly make its way back to our shores, where it might spread like a proverbial wildfire. They tend to. We will then be perfectly poised to address a genuine concern. We can employ a beginner's mind with our Yankee ingenuity to utterly vanquish that dread disease, once and for all, and for our own good this time. Then, we can license our cure on the open market. Other countries might agree to pay us dozens of billions of dollars for the right to innoculate their citizens against the dreaded disease. Ultimately, our treasury may be dozens and dozens of billions richer. We should also be short a few tens or hundreds of thousands of otherwise innocent citizens who will never become a burden to the public purse ever again. In this way, generational wealth will be created to ensure the ongoing fiscal health of the greatest nation ever to exist on Earth.

A penny not spent appears to be a penny liberated from a fate considerably worse than being saved. A penny never spent might be the definition of wealth, an asset that can be borrowed against and never taxed. A store of potential set aside never to use and a handy excuse for not contributing to most of the innumerable do-gooder efforts, especially those focused upon helping others rather than ourselves. A penny saved is more than a penny earned. It's a good intention taken out of circulation. It's an enduring symbol of the very best kind of luck. When my daughter was five or six, she heard the old aphorism, "Find a penny, pick it up. All the day, you'll have good luck." She took to leaving pennies wherever she went in the firm and delighted belief that she could bestow luck on people that way. It worked, too! We'd go to the library together, and she'd wander off to hide her pennies. The department store would be immeasurably luckier whenever she passed through. Her's was one of the genuinely best ideas I ever heard. I gleefully contributed my pennies to her effort.

I wonder how our public purse might be influenced if our billionaire benefactors had ever learned how to play Find A Penny, Pick It Up.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CHope , #PureSchmaltz