A team of Pentagon budget planners, economists, and psychologists recently analyzed forty years worth of personal finance data from twenty-four U.S. cities and reported that eighty-six percent of American adults and ninety-four percent of American teenagers should be been diagnosed as having: “deficit attention disorder.” A report to top Pentagon and White House officials warned that if the diagnosed affliction is not treated it could lead Americans to compulsively spend more money, to rapidly devalue future obligations, and leave many Americans unable to name the day, (referred to in past years as “tomorrow”), which comes after, “today”.

The report stated that when a sample of 600 Americans were asked to choose the correct definition of:“the next fiscal year”, eighty-two percent of the respondents choose option “d” which defined the next fiscal year as:

“Some far off time in the future when robots and Salvadorans do the work and computer viruses have deleted all the unpaid bills.”

The investigative leader of the Pentagon report, Dr. Howard Wayne, made an official statement in front a newly made $200-million F-22 jet fighter while a cluster of reporters from more than sixty newspapers looked on:

“Americans have lost the ability to plan for the future defense of this country or even plan for any future at all. If you ask the average person where he or she will be in ten years the average answer is:

“it doesn’t matter as long as everybody’s cell phone is turned on.”

Dr. Wayne gave one explanation to the twenty remaining reporters:

“Originally, we thought Americans believed that the big energy companies are heating the earth like a good Texas barbecue. That explains the, as-if-no-tomorrow, spending. But when we asked about this, people gave us answers such as:

‘Yeaah. Global heating is a complete, freaking, real hap-happening. But, it’s so far into the future, –like,– the sun will be totally burned out– by then anyway’. “

Howard Wayne explained to fourteen remaining blank faced reporters:

“This answer is worrisome for it indicates that Americans have gotten themselves into a position where their best hope for a solution to our fiscal problems is a disaster that changes the subject.”

The Pentagon team reported that the most severe case of deficit attention disorder was found inside the communications and political sectors of the economy. According to the report, stories on the Government deficits tend to sink towards the back section of newspapers and then slowly curl into the food and obituary sections.The Pentagon team also reported that they found that the deficit attention span of the broadcast media was, on average, fourteen seconds, or two seconds lower than that of children with the more well-known attention deficit disorder.

Said team leader Howard Wayne to three reporters left standing on the runway:

“The attention lines between children with attention deficit disorder and adults with deficit attention disorder crosses somewhere between the print and broadcast media. We have yet to get a measurement on a reporter than has both attention deficit disorder and deficit attention disorder but when we do; we want to see if that attention span is significantly different from that of the average representative in Congress.”

Conklin McNeil, the OMB assistant director for survival, put the problem in perspective:

“Our budget spaceship is caught in the grip of a black hole which is pulling our nation’s balances towards the dark point of no escape or return. When we point out the gravity of the situation—Congress and the American people, freeze up, light candles, and then, break out, singing happy birthday. When Americans see candles they remember they want to eat their cake too.”

Doctors and economists, studying possible deficit attention disorder treatments, have prescribed the following suggestions:

— Copies of People magazine in Doctor waiting rooms be replaced with upfront medical bills for each patient.

–Let talking live parrots to serve as credit cards.

And:

–Ban accounting firms from using double exit book keeping.

Said Dr. Wayne to the F22-fighter pilot, whose computer controlled plane had quietly rolled away, after the three remaining reporters slipped off:

“Americans want to forget deficits. But the massive growing debt won’t forget Americans in this real hard world of ours. One day, the working robots, Salvadorans, and computer viruses will come to your house and demand their money back, even if it’s your birthday, and your friends are in the middle of singing you a happy surplus song.”