First on education and terrorism. I started reading the book Three Cups of Tea. This book is about how Dr.Greg Mortenson is educating residents (in particular children and girls) of the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. His efforts are bringing change and in particular reducing the likelihood of those who live in villages that he brings schools to ever becoming terrorists. By broadening such efforts to the entire world terrorism can be reduced to near zero, not to mention the great increase in productivity that will follow the education. Yet we prefer to spend a trillion dollars (see What Have we Bought for $1 Trillion? on war.
This brings me to my next point. There is an incredible amount of work to be done in the US and world. See the diaries such as Feeding America: Voice of the homeless in Tent City 4 to see hunger in the US. Then there are the water main breaks, the bridges collapsing, the pot holes, the lack of energy not dependent on producing CO2 and on and on. A few trillion dollars fixing these problems will pay massive dividends for years. There is so much that we can do to increase the wealth of the US and world, and yet money is spent to drill for oil without the knowledge of how to "plug the hole" in a timely fashion. The country has suffered a catastrophic loss due to lack of appropriate infrastructure in Louisiana and other Gulf coast states and yet we don't spend the money to develop the infrastructure. And now come the hurricanes.
No the oil mess is not Katrina, another bigger hurricane may be coming and New Orleans still has not recovered from the first. Why? In large part due to a lack of spending on infrastructure. The same reason that we cannot plug the dam hole. The tools just were not developed. BP has already spent a billion dollars on the mess, and will spend hundreds of billions dollar more on the clean up. The mess will cost the country easily over a trillion dollars, yet people complain of spending money to create wealth.
The bottom line is we need education, research, technology, infrastructure, to reverse global warming, and so much more. To worry about deficits is nonsensical. I am reminded of the monkey who was taught to exchange coins for bananas. The coins became more valuable than the bananas. This is what the deficit hawks have learned. Money is more important to them than the products needed for us to live. We need to change our values.
Comments are closed on this story.