How to Make a Billion Dollars
by Jean Carnahan

Just last week came the saga of Claude Allen, the man who rubbed elbows with the mighty in the White House corridors, but in his spare time played a fraudulent merchandise game at the local Target store. We shook our heads at the downfall of yet another ranking official and some expressed their pity—as the good-hearted are prone to do on such occasions.

Now comes Tekle Zigetta, 45, who may have eclipsed the neo-con whiz kid in the dumb stunt department. While investigating Zigetta for currency smuggling, U.S. Customs agents in California found a billion dollar bill in his apartment. Actually, it wasn’t just one bill—which should have been more than enough for most travelers—but 250 of the bogus, yellowed and wrinkled bills! Tekle said he found them in a cave in the Philippines but, of course, that’s what they all say.
The non-too-clever smuggler adorned his unique bills with a picture of President Grover Cleveland. However, Cleveland’s likeness already appears on the $1,000 bill. That bill, along with the $500, $5,000, and $10,000 bills have not been printed since 1969. The $100,000, our largest bill, was last printed over seventy years ago.

Unbeknownst to poor Tekle, there has never been a billion dollar bill. But when smuggling, the larger denomination bills were simply easier to transport than a suitcase of twenties.

I have no idea what this numbskull intended to do with such a cumbersome collection of currency after arriving in the United States. So I let my imagination run wild.

Perhaps he had in mind helping to pay down our national debt, rebuild New Orleans, set up a national health care plan, or finance his own war. After all, getting rid of that much dough takes a big plan. Maybe he simply wanted to create a new, high stakes Monopoly game. Or, perhaps impress naive young women—though it might have been troublesome making change for a parking meter outside a bar.

Tekle strikes me as the antithesis of Dr. Evil, the cosmic Rip Van Winkle who re-emerged to hold the world hostage for a mere one million dollars. Tekle, by contrast, was a big numbers kind of guy. For that reason, his big bill idea might be useful to U.S. Treasurer John Snow, who is always in search of innovative ways to make ends meet. Snow could have forestalled the administration’s embarrassing request of Congress to raise the debt limit for the fourth time had he been able to run off a mega buck or two.

If the Treasury is ever allowed to print a one billion dollar bill, I suggest the note bear the image of George W. Bush as a reminder of his historic debt creation. We might want to show Tekel’s name on it somewhere, too, as the founder of the ten-digit denomination.