The discussion below based on the assumption that the budget is balanced, and the 10 men only drink what they can afford collectively as a group. The only question then is how to divide up the bill fairly among the people.

But what if the bar bill costs $120 each week, and the ten men agree they will pay $100 of it now and $20 in the following week.

The bartender says “OK – I’ll give you an IOU” but you’ll have to pay interest on it and that will decrease the amount of beer that you and your friends can buy in the future.

And if you don’t pay the IOU off – and the debt keeps getting larger – then your kids will have to assume the debt and it will be passed from generation to generation where it will impact their life. At some point, your kids won’t be able to buy any beer at all, because they are continuing to pay for the beer that you drank in years before. As well as the interest on the IOU. And at some point, I may just have to cut you all off as a group because you owe me too much.

So now the ninth and tenth richest men at the bar push for paying as little as possible – they want the tax cuts ! – and the benefits of the lower bill will go directly to them. They won’t ever pay the IOU – that is someone else’s problem – and they really don’t care about the next generation and their ability to buy beer.

The truth is – it was all about them. The ninth and tenth richest men were so focused on paying the bartender as little as possible each week, that they didn’t realize that their greediness and short-term thinking would eventually shut down the whole system and close the bar.

In the end, the bartender stopped accepting IOUs form the group and the credit dried up. He started by firing half of his waitresses since there were fewer customers to serve. In the end, he couldn’t pay his bills to the supplier and had to go out of business. And this left the nine and tenth richest men with no friends and no place to go out to each week.

And the ninth and tenth richest men looked at each other and said –

“How could this possibly have happened?”

“Could my selfish tax cuts and foolish spending policies over the past eight years have contributed to this?”

And they sat there as if they didn’t know the answer.
And they STILL asked for more tax cuts, because they couldn’t think of anything that was be beneficial for the group.