How I Will Save the Economy

By Joel Stein

At first it felt good, this tanking-economy thing. My friends from Stanford no longer had options to brag about, my mom stopped rubbing my face in her precious Cisco stock, and I was hearing a lot less from James Cramer. But then I realized it might affect me: no more free deliveries of items ordered on the Web, the end of the tasting menu, less airtime for Maria Bartiromo--even an e-mail about getting rid of the free Snapple from our office refrigerators, though I may have hastened that by hoarding the remaining cases under my desk late one night last week.

The problem as I see it is that Alan Greenspan is a one-trick pony. Raise rates, drop rates--the guy's got less range than Joe Pesci. Greenspan seems to think the economy is some fancy numbers system. I'm no economer, but I know that if I spend a dollar, someone makes a dollar, so it's basically a zero-sum game. What I'm saying is that someone is stealing from the economy. And until I catch him--and I think I have a pretty good idea which Fed chairman has the access to pull off something of this magnitude--I'm ginning up a plan to make up for those losses.

Things started to unravel when the dotcoms realized banner ads weren't working. So if we all go online right now and start clicking on banner ads until our fingers bleed, we might be able to make those little numbers in the corner of the CNBC screen go the other way.

When I was in high school, whenever we needed to raise cash for the debate club or the school newspaper, we sold candy bars. We all need to start selling candy bars. You can get these from suppliers at about 50[cents] and unload them for a dollar. The genius is you have to pay for the ones you will inevitably end up eating yourself. Those profits go straight to the economy.

In the past, when other countries had problems, we trucked in 50 rock stars to sing about it. It's time to start thinking about ourselves. I'm imagining something like We Are the Economy. I hear Bono belting out, "There's an IPO after every storm/ a VC ready to lend a hand/ Just hold on, baby/ Hold on to your Janus Global Tech Fund, man." Also, it might be nice to join hands across the country wearing the same T shirt. It will let other countries know we're serious and organized, if a little fruity.

I think we may have horribly misinvested our money in the past decade, pouring it into research and development for Intel and Microsoft and Amazon. When I was a kid and we went through a boom, people put their money in cocaine and models and German cars. I don't think it helped, but it made for better conversation than going on about the price you bought Yahoo at.

Finally, I don't know how many of you realize this, but writing humor columns pays surprisingly well. And it's really not that hard. If we all wrote just one humor column each week, I'm pretty sure we'd be out of this slump in no time. Except for Greenspan. He doesn't seem funny.