There's Lots of Money

Man riding by on bicycle
snatches elderly woman’s
bag of dog poop.

It has often been argued that no one should have to go hungry because there is lots of food in the world. The problem has always been one of distribution. I don’t know if this is completely true or not, but I do know that it is claimed that 50% of food in the U.S. is wasted. And I also know that perfectly good crops are sometimes burned or buried in order to keep their prices high. It must certainly be true that no one in the U.S. should have to go hungry. But they do.

So it is, it seems to me, with money. We read every day about the national debt, how much we owe China and others, and so on. But as it is with food, so it is with money. There is a lot of money, lots and lots of it. The problem is in the distribution. And the distribution is importantly a problem of priorities. I don’t know the actual figures and amounts, nor am I an economist. But I’m pretty sure that if we stopped funding our unnecessary “wars” we would have a lot of money to help pay down our debts. Similarly, if we stopped providing troops and military hardware to countries like Japan, Germany, Israel, and others, we would have still more money. And, if we stopped funding military bases all around the world in an attempt to create our hidden “empire,” we would have even more money. We’d probably be drowning in money, the national debt would soon disappear, fried chicken could be free, as would Viagra and Cialis, health care and tuition could also be free, and we’d all live happily ever after in a relative paradise. This assumes, of course, that these “wars” and military bases, etc., are costing us more than we are getting in return. Does anyone know what we are getting in return from Afghanistan and Iraq? I didn’t think so. What would we gain by attacking Iran? What exactly is the purpose of all these “wars” and such. Along with our unnecessary “wars” is the related matter of the military/industrial/political complex. Why are we spending so much building planes and tanks and ships and artillery and ammunition and supplies that are for the most part not even needed? I gather we spend something like half our annual budget on our defenses, but who are we defending against? Just who is it out there that is planning to invade the U.S.? We could, I am pretty certain, cut our defense budget in half and suffer no substantial loss of security. Think of all the money we’d have then!

Of course there is still a huge pot of money available if we did not have such strange ideas about how it should be distributed. Why should a small percentage of individuals have more money than the other 90% of the population? Can anyone offer any sensible reason for this? Is there any social, moral, ethical, logical, practical, or redeeming reason why individuals should have hundreds of millions and billions of dollars? I don’t believe that everyone should have the same amount of money, or that all individuals are equally deserving of it, but, really, when the distribution is so drastically skewed as it currently is, something needs to be done about it. This would be relatively easy matter to fix, just raise the tax rate for the obscenely rich by a very large percentage. They wouldn’t even know the difference.

What I am suggesting is no doubt obvious, and it could be done, and our country and the rest of the world would be better off for it. Of course there is no chance it will be done, at least not in the foreseeable future. It would require a kind of leadership and motivation we don’t have. It would immediately be branded as socialism or even worse, communism. Never mind that the most happy and contented people live in Scandinavian countries that practice forms of social democracy, where everyone has health care, Universities are free (or mostly free), there are relatively few homeless, few, if any, hungry, and their defense budgets are entirely realistic rather than obviously insane. Our current values of “greed is good,” “privatization,” “shop ‘til you drop,” “it’s your fault if you are poor,” and “I’ve got mine,” along with our intense religious faith in the profit motive, will never allow us happiness or well-being (except for the few). We have lost any real sense of community or any basic ideas about human worth and dignity. Some are now observing that the recent mine disaster resulted from putting profits ahead of human lives. So…that has become part of our basic ethos, it happens every day in one form or another. Forty five thousand a year die from not having medical care, we can’t afford it. We just killed some innocent children, it’s their parents fault for bringing them along, you’re hungry, get a job, we just blew up another wedding party, collateral damage, land mines kill hundreds of children every year, we need them for protection (visitors from outer space), people in Gaza are being slowly destroyed, Israel is our closest friend, we reserve the right to preventative “war” (they might do something, someday, we wouldn’t like), and so it goes. It is, I fear, the American way.

LKBIQ:
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
Artemus Ward

TILT:
Brie and Camembert are essentially the same, being made from the same “recipe.”