"Your Highness, I don't want money for this. Or jewels. All I want is a little rice."
"Hmm," thought the king, who was a con man himself. "I've got rice. How much rice?"
"All I want," said the craftsman, "is for you to put a single grain of rice on the first square, two grains on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth, and so on and so on and so on, for the full 64 squares."
The first few squares on the board cost the king one grain, then two, then four ... by the end of the first row, he was up to 128 grains.
In the second row, things got out of hand. By the 21st square he owed over a million grains; by the 41st, it was over a trillion grains of rice — more rice than he, his subjects or any king anywhere could afford.
20ish years ago the National Debt was $2T. Rumsfeld declared that the DoD had accidentally lost that amount. Woopsie! The next day was 9/11. We went to war, and the national debt immediately doubled. Then it got doubled again, then doubled again, then doubled again. Now we are here.
I know I'll sound like a Conspiracy Theorist but... maybe we got conned?
A Chinese proverb:
20ish years ago the National Debt was $2T. Rumsfeld declared that the DoD had accidentally lost that amount. Woopsie! The next day was 9/11. We went to war, and the national debt immediately doubled. Then it got doubled again, then doubled again, then doubled again. Now we are here.
I know I'll sound like a Conspiracy Theorist but... maybe we got conned?