We buy stuff with money that we don't have. We promise to pay for it with money that we may never get. By the time we get our stuff paid for, it's broken. Then we go out and buy more stuff.  That is the definition of the word credit.

Today I would like to discuss the history of credit and how it all came about.

Credit has been around for centuries. It started with the early cave man. Uugg wanted a fancy stone club like the one his neighbor Oogg had. He believed it would make him a better hunter. After all, he worked as hard as Oogg did and he deserved a nice club. Besides that, he had more children. So off Uugg went, down to the local Stoneware Store and bought one on credit. He promised to pay for it in three easy installments of two dinosaurs per month for the following three months.

Uugg used the club to kill dinosaurs which he gave to the Stoneware Store for two months. By the third month he and his family had starved to death and the store owner came and took back the club, his cave, and his one surviving child. This was all legal since the credit application had been written and signed in stone. That's why people stopped paying for stuff with dinosaurs and began using those shiny chunks of rock called "gold nuggets".

When it was discovered that the shiny rocks were valuable, everyone began digging them out of the caves. Incidentally, this is the way "house cleaning" was discovered.

After a while and much digging by everyone from all over the continent, the shiny rocks kept getting harder and harder to find. It was also difficult to flash your wealth around because the sacks of rocks were so heavy. This is why Quasimodo became known as "The Hunchback". He was the richest man of his time, but his back had become terribly bowed over from carrying all these sacks of shiny rocks around. Even though being weighted down with riches sounds like a good thing, it really can become a hazard, so people began using paper.

The paper was easier to carry. It wasn't bulky, which made it easier for Robin Hood to rob the rich and give the money to the poor. The paper money was undetectable when Robin Hood stuffed the millions he stole inside his tights. Folks just thought he had huge thighs. However, all the kings men as well as the poor began manufacturing their own money. They cut pieces of paper from the Wall Street Journal and Sears & Roebuck catalogues. Soon everybody had so much paper it became worthless. Robin Hood stopped robbing people since his tights were now full of money which  nobody wanted. This caused him to waddle like a duck whenever he tried to walk, and that is how the term "tight wad" came about.

By now the government decided to take over control of all the money. They called it Internal Revenue. They began to make the money out of green paper only.  They put pictures of dead presidents on the front and a picture of a building on the back. They also wrote a lot of numbers and Latin words on it. They decided to call it "cash" which comes from the Latin word "munie" meaning "the root of all evil".

Thousands of years later man was still using this green paper, but it was slowly becoming worthless. Unless you had a sack full of this paper you couldn't buy anything. And carrying around sacks of this stuff made it difficult to use public transport. Besides, the airlines kept losing it. It also takes a long long time to acquire a sack of this paper stuff called cash, so that is why we now buy things on credit.
 
Now instead of having sacks of paper we use little square plastic cards to buy stuff with money that we don't have. We promise to pay for it with money that we may never get.  When we get it paid for we will go out and buy more stuff because the stuff we have now will be broken.

And that, Dear Children, is how the term plastic money came about.  And that is the reason we now live in a world of debt, politics, and collective ignorance.  It's so easy a cave man can do it.