How to Scale Up Your Holiday Panhandling
By: Matthew Butterman
Tags: Christmas, Satire, Humor, Donald Trump, Charity

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Covid 19 has put a damper on the spirit of this season, particularly the reassuring jingles of coin donations. Feeling anxious over abrupt declines from pre-pandemic free loading? Or envious of the clanking in those red metal tins of the Salvation Army? If you’d like to divert some of that good will over to your own street corner, without stooping to lively bell ringing, here’s your holiday guide on how to scale up.

By following a few simple steps, those of us on the dole this holiday season can massively expand our beggar’s share without the need for a hapless street shuffle, tricky shell game or repetitive harmonica solo.

After taking these steps you’ll be swimming in Colt 45, bathing in Christmas plonk, and snorting lines of “powdery snow” off the backs of reindeer!

To advise us about these directives, we asked an “internationally known consultant” to weigh in (and we also mean that literally). He didn’t want to give us his real name, so we’ll call him “Kris(p) Kash Kringle.”

Kringle wanted us to reassure our readers that he is the greatest financial mind in all of world history, wayyyy better than that hack Adam Smith. Indeed, Kringle is a veritable stable genius, to use his own words, and he graduated at the top of his class, or thereabouts, from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. And he wanted us to remind you that UPenn is an Ivy League school, in case you’d forgotten.

Here are Kringle’s steps toward world domina─ er, I mean fatter wallets this season.

Step 1 — Let others do the heavy lifting

Kringle said that only stupid people — “real morons” to use his words — actually work hard. The secret is to hire other people to do your work for you. While your minions work the corners, you stay inside in a warm, dry, place and “supervise.” Supervision is a vague concept that involves a wide range of executive tasks, including managing social media accounts (Kringle is a devotee of Twitter), assessing public image, and building your legal team. Kringle uses Fox News programming to help him identify strong candidates.

This is not to say, however, that you shouldn’t show up at your desk, or your street corner as the case may be, looking “managerial”. A scowl on your face and a teetering temper worked wonders for George Costanza’s career in a famous episode of Seinfeld, and it can drive up your worth as well.

“Nobody has to like the boss,” says Kringle. “Nobody likes me. That’s ok, they’re all losers, all of them.”

Step 2 — Pay yourself first

This maxim of entrepreneurs still rings true in the world of high-finance panhandling: when revenue comes in, pay yourself before anyone else, or you might not get paid at all.

This isn’t necessarily being selfish, cautioned Kringle. He said it’s sort of like the rule of putting on your own oxygen mask first if they drop during a flight, then afterward worrying about your children or other loved ones traveling with you.

“That way, if you suck up all the oxygen on the plane, it will at least appear that you did so in the best interest of your family,” he said.

Kringle actually takes this step a bit further: he only pays himself.

“If you start giving away money to your employees and contractors, those losers will keep coming back with their hands out every other Friday,” he said.

Step 3 — Build a quality sales funnel

These days, coins in a can won’t really cut it in the world of uber-panhandling, and if you do take coins, maybe they ought to be bitcoins anyway.

Kringle told us that the secret to positive cash flow is having several sources of non-taxable income through charitable “storefronts” on the internet. He’s used the popular fundraising platform GoFundMe, but he also set up a family foundation to generate revenue without the pesky oversight of state authorities and the IRS. The guidelines for private foundations are more laissez-faire and less distinct overall.

Just avoid running your operation in New York state, says Kringle. “All those women in the state government there are nasty. Really really nasty!”

Step 4 — Print your own money and trade up!

This step is reserved only for major players in world finance like Kringle, who has authority to print and issue currency, and to reserve it largely for himself and his close associates.

But Kringle got to be in a place where he can enact this final move on the chessboard that is high-stakes panhandling by perfectly executing all three of the previous steps, and repeating them again and again without oversight.

It may sound cold and hard, but one must think “bigly” and then success will follow, Krisp Kash Kringle says.

“Let someone else win the Noble (sic) Peace Prize,” he says. “Humanitarians are weak losers.”

After filling your coffers with liquid currency, don’t forget to take this opportunity to trade up your fixed assets. This is exactly what Kringle does.

“People are saying that since my traditional home is Greenland, I should just own it. There must be a thousand shithole islands I could trade. You know they say Thousand Island dressing is a lot like Russian dressing, which is far better than that socialist French dressing which they say is the worst. Absolute worst, that socialist dressing.”

“So I say to myself, I’ll just find an island somewhere, trade up …and leave Puerto Rico to Pocahontas.”

Ahhhhh, Christmas!