California to Save State by Issuing IOU’s

SACRAMENTO CALIFORNIA- The state of California may soon begin issuing IOU’s to its creditors. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pushed lawmakers to close the state’s budget deficit, to eliminate the lack of money in the state’s coffers to pay its bills. It is also rumored that, in order to cut the state’s monetary expenditures further, state employees may be asked to take an additional, unpaid day off from work per month.

While speaking outside an exclusive celebrity gym in Sacramento, the governor defended his position saying, “Here in California, we understand how ruthless Mother Nature can be. In the end, it should not be our fault if this great state should fall into ruin, but that of the faults placed here by the dinosaurs [who] once roamed this land.”

When asked for clarification regarding the governor’s position, his chief adviser Mr. Dustin D. Shelves stated that the governor understood that while U.S. currency had been considered a standard, followed by many countries worldwide, it is no longer backed by any tangible item of intrinsic value. This had put the government into a position where if more money was printed, then more money could be spent. In addition to fault lines that constantly threaten to tear California apart, global warming could melt polar ice caps, raising sea levels alarmingly and flooding lower lying areas of California and many other states.

“The governor realizes that the best thing we, as Californians, could do to slow global warming would be to sequester as much greenhouse gas as possible,” argued Mr. Shelves. “Unlike balloons which must first be manufactured and then filled, trees are an excellent and natural way to sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Therefore, it would be a crime against future generations to continue cutting down trees to make paper money when we could simply cut our budget down instead.”

Environmental Scientists contacted by The Vitamin Press were dumbfounded by the governor’s reasoning, saying that the issues of global warming and [arguably] worthless paper money were not directly connected. Many referred to the governor’s statements as “Hollywood politics”.

However, when former Vice President and environmental guru Al Gore was informed of this accusation, he called it a “convenient lie”. Mr. Gore elaborated, saying, “While IOU’s are also printed on paper, they are more like cheques. Rather than printing many different Federal Reserve notes which must conform to a set of previously established denominations, a single IOU maintains the flexibility of being able to be assigned any dollar value written on it, thus using less paper per debt.”

Environmental activists in the Los Angeles-based organization California Retirees for Arbor Protection have already noted that the governor’s current efforts will likely be in vain. While less paper may be used by the government in printing IOU’s than paper money, a black market (or more accurately, a black bank) has already been established to buy state IOU’s using freshly printed counterfeit money, thus cancelling out any savings in paper gained from the IOU’s.