KurtBoyer25L
04-23-2011, 09:37 PM
Some friends have helped with me a simple thought experiment intended to show how little Obama and mainstream liberal politicans actually care about the poor and hungry. This is just for the sake of argument, not to necessarily support government-imposed charity etc.
A premise of the mainstream position on poverty seems to be that our government does not have enough tax money to pay for a true safety net. So, therefore we have to "tax the rich" more and more to pay for ever-expanding social programs until we get it right, as opposed to deconstructing the Federal government which would (of course) lead to "starving in the streets." This is ridiculous if one compares the costs of domestic charity vs. our current trillions tied up in militarism.
At the height of the Libyan campaign the U.S. spent around $100M per day in Libya to kill and maim. Of course this is a fraction of what we pay for our empire overseas, but that makes it a good starting point. My position is that a privately ran charity organization, given a daily income of one hundred million dollars, around 1% of current Federal spending, could effectively wipe out starvation in the United States within a matter of a few years.
Think about it...you spend the first month leasing & staffing thousands of offices across the country. Your first month's income is about three billion dollars, or $100M per day for 30 days. Even if you paid in advance for 1000 locations in the first week, you'd have 250,000$ to spend on each one if you needed it and still only spend three days' income. Then with the next month's $2,800,000,000 you could pay (avg.) 100 food-delivery guys in each state a year's salary in advance at 100,000$ each if you wanted, and still have 2.5 billion dollars left for other costs over a year.
Then you start buying the food. Just the 2.7B left over from the first month's budget would buy how many tons of wheat products? How many vitamins? How many apples? According to possibly-inflated estimates from interest groups, there are about 50M homes in America with food insecurity. That's certainly a lot, and one could disagree with the numbers. But you could easily deliver every poor neighborhood $1000's worth of wholesale staple foods every month. Then just imagine if you took just a few million per week & poured it into advertising for local food drives everywhere, the final stores of which you could offer for free to means-tested families. If they live out in the country, you can deliver food to them.
It is admittedly much more complex than this to run a national charity, at any cost or size. There are also of course moral arguments against setting up such a Ralph Nader private/public style charity system. Finally, most people in America are surrounded by more wild food than they could ever eat, and no mentally competent person should ever die of starvation here unless stranded in unlucky circumstances. I have watched many bums walk through vacant urban lots full of edible greens, roots, stems and nuts, to beg for money to buy 1/100 of the food freely available to them. But, this is an education problem, and today's liberal point of view is very pragmatic/direct one.
How do we feed the hungry kids? Well for one, Washington D.C.'s spare pocket change would be more than enough! It shows just how mind-bogglingly apathetic most "progressives" are to their own stated goals. Moreover, it shows the classic "Starving in the streets" argument about Liberty candidates is so absolutely absurd. Our government does so little to help the poor, yet people claim if we remove those in power the poor will suffer so greatly. It insults the intelligence.
A premise of the mainstream position on poverty seems to be that our government does not have enough tax money to pay for a true safety net. So, therefore we have to "tax the rich" more and more to pay for ever-expanding social programs until we get it right, as opposed to deconstructing the Federal government which would (of course) lead to "starving in the streets." This is ridiculous if one compares the costs of domestic charity vs. our current trillions tied up in militarism.
At the height of the Libyan campaign the U.S. spent around $100M per day in Libya to kill and maim. Of course this is a fraction of what we pay for our empire overseas, but that makes it a good starting point. My position is that a privately ran charity organization, given a daily income of one hundred million dollars, around 1% of current Federal spending, could effectively wipe out starvation in the United States within a matter of a few years.
Think about it...you spend the first month leasing & staffing thousands of offices across the country. Your first month's income is about three billion dollars, or $100M per day for 30 days. Even if you paid in advance for 1000 locations in the first week, you'd have 250,000$ to spend on each one if you needed it and still only spend three days' income. Then with the next month's $2,800,000,000 you could pay (avg.) 100 food-delivery guys in each state a year's salary in advance at 100,000$ each if you wanted, and still have 2.5 billion dollars left for other costs over a year.
Then you start buying the food. Just the 2.7B left over from the first month's budget would buy how many tons of wheat products? How many vitamins? How many apples? According to possibly-inflated estimates from interest groups, there are about 50M homes in America with food insecurity. That's certainly a lot, and one could disagree with the numbers. But you could easily deliver every poor neighborhood $1000's worth of wholesale staple foods every month. Then just imagine if you took just a few million per week & poured it into advertising for local food drives everywhere, the final stores of which you could offer for free to means-tested families. If they live out in the country, you can deliver food to them.
It is admittedly much more complex than this to run a national charity, at any cost or size. There are also of course moral arguments against setting up such a Ralph Nader private/public style charity system. Finally, most people in America are surrounded by more wild food than they could ever eat, and no mentally competent person should ever die of starvation here unless stranded in unlucky circumstances. I have watched many bums walk through vacant urban lots full of edible greens, roots, stems and nuts, to beg for money to buy 1/100 of the food freely available to them. But, this is an education problem, and today's liberal point of view is very pragmatic/direct one.
How do we feed the hungry kids? Well for one, Washington D.C.'s spare pocket change would be more than enough! It shows just how mind-bogglingly apathetic most "progressives" are to their own stated goals. Moreover, it shows the classic "Starving in the streets" argument about Liberty candidates is so absolutely absurd. Our government does so little to help the poor, yet people claim if we remove those in power the poor will suffer so greatly. It insults the intelligence.