Robert Mugabe's Million Dollar Birthday

As Zimbabwe's skyrocketing inflation rate hit nearly 1,600% this week, dictator Robert Mugabe has clearly been working hard on finding a solution to his country's problems. Being a Marxist, and not a particularly bright one at that, he had the brilliant idea of simply printing more Zimbabwean dollars and pumping more currency into a circulation. For some strange reason, that simply makes inflation worse. Then he instituted state price controls with strict enforcement, figuring that surely, this is the key to economic recovery. After all, what possible link could there be between monetary supply, decades of diastrous fiscal policies, and prices?

It appears that "Comrade Bob" has finally stumbled upon a winning strategy for fixing one of the world's worst economies: just tacking on a bunch of zeroes to the banknotes and then moving on to focus on more pressing matters of state.

Starting with figuring out how the state treasury would raise the equivalent of nearly one and a half million US dollars to pay for his 83rd birthday party.

While Zimbabwe's economic and physical infrastructure has completely collapsed, and doctors and teachers earn less in a month than American fast food workers earn in a day, Mugabe has authorized functionaries of the ruling Zanu PF party to raise the money for his birthday celebration. Anyone who claims that Mugabe is unable to prioritize is wrong - they simply don't realize that he has unfailingly selfish priorities. This latest affront to good taste and common sense may be a last hurrah for Mugabe, as rumors abound that the elderly dictator is being nudged out by his own political party.