Will the Air Man Deliver Door to Door?

[from 2/10/10]

I can't help but think that I'm not explaining homelessness well. I've been trying to do so for over 14 years now, and I just don't seem to be getting the main points across. Truly, I haven't been very good at explaining the major, major, drawbacks of pre-emptive warfare either, but we don't have readers seeing pre-emptive warfare on their own streets everyday, so it's very hard to make that real. But homelessness? I mean, there it is, here's why, here's why it's bad, here's what needs to be done, and that's what gets done, right? Problem seen is a problem solved? Right?

OK, not right. So I'm going to try again by using what we may call a fictitious parallel. I will present a scenario that might happen in the future that would be similar to homelessness, and hopefully everyone will see that the imagined situation would be wrong, and how to make it right again, and see that something like that might work for the problem at hand.

Forget global warming. Let's pretend that the US economy collapses first because the Chinese want their investment back. Suppose this results in the Chinafication of America. Don't worry, it doesn't mean we'll all be speaking Chinese. Not right away. It just means that we'll be running our businesses like they do, or we won't have any. So our cities will end up like Beijing, and you won't be able to breathe the air anymore.

Suppose that happens all over the world. As LA goes, so goes Paris, London, Johannesburg, and Papeete. I know it's a stretch. Buy the premise.

There is already, in this city, with no real shortage of tap water, a hoarding of water resources. There are almost no working water fountains left on Seattle streets. Homeless people who want water are expected to pay for it at coffee shops and fast food joints. No outside cups are allowed. Only the establishment's cups, which cost.

If there were a real clean air shortage, there would be clean air hoarding. Clean air can be made at slight cost, but it would be sold at a markup. "We have to make a profit or we can't stay in business," the producers would say. Only as much clean air would be produced as could be sold at "optimal" profit margins. If it's free no one makes a profit. If even Bill Gates can't afford it, then, likewise, no one makes money. In between those extremes, the total net profit rises from zero and falls back to zero. The price is set at the peak.

Everybody who can't afford the optimal price doesn't get clean air. Everybody whose income allows them to afford the optimal price, pays through the nose for clean air, but they at least get to breathe while doing so. The clean-air-less are the ones who can't afford it.

The air gets worse. The clean-air-less become a social problem. They start costing society money! They show up at emergency rooms with expensive respiratory illnesses.

While in the hospital they get air as part of their treatment, but as soon as they're well enough they get put out into the bad air as before.

As the clean-air-less become desperate, some panhandle, in the hopes of either making enough change to buy some air for an hour or so, or at least a bottle of wine, so they can forget about the problem. Others beg for a hit of clean air directly, just for a half minute of relief. Others just walk around coughing. The general public gets tired of this behavior. Why do they cough so much? How rude. Why don't these people earn more money so they can pay for their own air?

Well, if you were paying attention above, you'd know all that would do is move the optimal peak price up. So every effort to get people to solve their own breathing problems, by getting their own lives together, would fail.

You Get the War You Pay For

[from 11/25/09]

A recent story in the New York Times, written by Christopher Drew, about the Afghan War, had this sentence: "Even if fewer troops are sent, or their mission is modified, the rough formula used by the White House, of about $1 million per soldier a year, appears almost constant." I liked that. It was a very nice, neat, clarification of the situation at hand. With the help of that sort of clarification, we can all decide what we want to do about it all. Do we want to panic? If so, and I assume so, by how much?

I mean, money doesn't grow on trees. Fruit grows on trees. Know how many apples you have to sell to make one million dollars in the apple business? Neither do I. But if apples were money, I'd be out in the orchards right now, and I'd know the answer to that question.

We need to conserve our valuable resources. We need to spend our war money the best possible way, to get the best bang for our bucks, so to speak (heh). Do we really want to waste our money killing Afghans (rugs) with our soldiers? Couldn't we kill Afghans more cheaply? Or maybe we don't want to kill Afghans at all. Maybe we could find a way to use our million per soldier to just get them to go away and leave our country alone.

When you think of it that way, a lot of options seem to leap out at you, or me, or one of us. Here's one picked at random from the many that are impinging on me now. We give every single soldier about five hundred dollars for a nice outfit, including decent shoes, $1000 worth of Afghan spending money (more than you need to live a year in a medieval economy where the per capita GDP is $760), a $3 English/Afghan/English phrase book, a $5 Afghan tour map, and tell him/her to go spread the remaining $998,492 around buying Afghan "friends".

Here's how that could go. There's 28 million Afghans, give or take. There's 68,000 US soldiers, give or take. We are talking about divvying up $67,897,456,000, thereabouts, amongst the 28,000,000 Afghans, giving each one, assuming it's spread equal, roughly $2,425, man women and child, or about three years worth of spending money for everyone now working the poppy farms or related to someone who is.

And we can provide that three years worth of Afghan friend-making money every single year, thus tripling these people's standard of living. They'd be friends with us three times over, all the time, until we got tired of it. Then, when we've got them completely dependent on us, we could pull out all our troops and totally destabilized their country, and say, "Sayonara suckers! You messed with the wrong dudes!" And we'd have won.

That was just one of the dozens and dozens of ideas that are hurtling at my brain, for how better to spend our war money.

Here's another one, just as random. Bring the troops home. Send social service workers instead, with the $68,000,000,000 we would have used to keep the troops there for a year. Have the social service workers put on massive, and I mean on the scale of Blitzkrieg-massive, Turkey dinners all over Afghanistan, all on the same day. For all that money, every single Afghan could be stuffed with 20 turkeys, 200 pounds of stuffing, 100 pounds of yams and corn and corn/mixed vegetable/medley/garbage, unknown quantities of (what's that crap? oh yeah) cranberry sauce and enough pumpkin pie with whipped cream on top to stupor them all sick.

Then, we send our troops back in and they meet no resistance.

Or not. Think how long it will take them to get back on their feet. Maybe we could just repeat annually, and keep our troops home indefinitely. How 'bout that?

The Unstimulated

Everybody get ready, we're all about to be economically stimulated!

The Dems and Reps finally agreed on an economic stimulus package. Barring a Bush signing statement that says something like, "Thanks loads; I'll give all the money out to my rich friends," this means most of us will get lump sums of money to stimulate the economy.

Being poor, I was interested, I would even say stimulated, by this news. I wanted to know what the actual law said so I could see if I was going to get some, and how much. This meant going to the federal government website and guessing the magic combination that would unlock the bill's text. I won't bother you with the details of that quest, it's enough to say, "many Bothans died to bring us this information." What I learned after reading the text of the law (HR 1540.ENR) plus supporting law (the Social Security Act, and relevant IRS code) is that if the chicken's innards fall eastward when the moon is high in the west, then I will in fact get a check for $300 by the end of the bureaucratic summer. This is because when I put my income sources together my total income exceeds the lower cutoff of $3000.

Oh, I might have to file an income tax form this year (I don't, usually, because I don't ever come close to owing taxes) but that's OK, because I never owe taxes, because I'm too poor.

But then I thought, "Whoa, what if I was so poor that my income for all of 2007 was less than $3000?" In that case Congress has seen to it that I wouldn't get a dime. It's times like this I wish Congress got a signing statement of its own. They could use it to tell us What They Were Thinking. Since there is no such thing, it falls to me to tell you What They Might Have Been Thinking, if they indeed were. Several possibilities occur.

1. If we're going to stimulate the economy, we need to give money to people who know how to spend it. Would someone who makes less than $3000 a year know how to spend money? Obviously not! Not enough experience!

2. Triage. There's no point in trying to stimulate a sector of the economy that's going to die no matter what we're willing to do to revive it.

3. They'd only spend the money on food and rent. No money would go to the major corporations that have done massive out-sourcing. When we talk about "the American economy," what else did you think we meant? Did you think we meant Willamette Valley cranberry farmers? Get real.

4. You stimulate the economy you have, not the economy you wish you had.

5. You know what happens when a poor person wins $30,000,000 in the lottery? How they end up as poor as ever within a year, and worse off than ever, because they're all Jerry Springer fodder? It would be like that if we gave them $300. Only 1/100,000ths as much.

6. This is a great land of opportunity, so if anybody is that poor they must be lazy. They're SO lazy that if we give them $300 they won't get off their butts to spend it, and it won't stimulate any economy.

7. This is a great land of opportunity, so if anybody is that poor they must be criminally stupid. They're SO stupid that if we gave them checks for $300 they would eat them, and that wouldn't stimulate the economy.

8. Less for the poor means more for the rest of us, and our children. (The law provides $300 for every child of middle class parents.)

9. Poor people don't vote for any of the politicians who passed this law, because you don't vote for the people who regularly rape you.

10. We have to save some money out to pay the high cost of killing people in other countries.