halogamer1989 said:
No worries. There is just a lot of uselessness in there and it is to the detriment of my gen and future gens to pay it back. I would rather spend it productively on infrastructure, clean coal, nuclear fusion, streamlining of biz, lowering corp taxation to bring jobs back here, and the like. It is not beneficial to waste money on foolishness like $99,600 for 2 person doorbell job and $200,000,000 African-American heritage trail that while touches on that race, is just plain dumb. Many of my AA friends agree. |
Regrettably the way politics work congressmen and senators of both parties will always sneak in pet projects and they make easy targets to ridicule and as a grandparent I think a lot about what we are leaving my grandson. But you are swatting at flies while ignoring the dinosaur. The most “wasteful” civilian program ever invented is a joke compared to military costs. The whole nature of the military, which I served in proudly, is to produce nothing and waste much.
According to one widely accepted figure:
“The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.
The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group's analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.”
Any such figure is an estimate and this one is a year old but it was never seriously disputed and is probably somewhere close. So in comparison the doorknob = 12 sec. and even your African American project is just over one work shift. Hardly statistical noise. I’ve had to watch promising medical research programs shut down by a government trying to hide the cost of war even though they were a few hundred thousand dollars and might well have contributed substantially to the health and well being of all mankind.
And saddest of all, we are talking about a war launched because of weapons of mass destruction which the CIA, DIA, Army Intelligence, Naval Intelligence, NSA and the State Department in an unprecedented show of unity said weren’t there. But the White House alone “knew better” and ignored all advice to the contrary. And in doing so managed to become a powerful recruiting tool for terrorists while creating a new breeding ground for them train in. Unfortunately in addition to the human casualties, the economy and the Constitution also went missing in action.
So you’re right about your future being put in hock but in the immortal words of Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”
