-Hello Washington? Are you listening? Hello?
Predator Press
[LOBO]
People are always asking me,
“LOBO, as one of the most widely-respected thinkers of the Twentieth Centurion, can you please weigh in on what America must do to salvage itself in these dark economic times?”
Well I’m glad you asked me that. See while not yet heralded for my accomplishments in the field of economics, I’m cool with that because those guys are a bunch of dumbass morons anyways.
As a staunch fan of space exploration and scientifical development, I think the gradual fade of our NASA funding may have been a clarion call things have been in economic decline for some time.
We have no one to blame but yourselves. And decades of unspectacular clarion players.
Am I bitter you people waited so long to consult me? Hell yes. Still it is incumbent upon all endowed with the radiant brainiosity such as mine -however uncommon- to protect all of Humankind under my iron fists of galvanized wisdom:
Warfare: We can’t pay Pakistan two
billion dollars a year to fight terrorism. I’ll be kind and suggest Pakistan is merely incapable of reciprocating the intended value of that money, as demonstrated by the recently-found hideout of Osama bin Laden [ObL].
We look at the situation like cancer: if we don’t encourage or enable governments to resist the infiltration of extremists, in ten years the respective “host” will be so addled they will be impossible to diplomatically relate to.
-But the problem is our cancer patient doesn’t want to get the necessary chemotherapy.
I think this is self-correcting. Like cancer, the host dies and takes the disease with it. Remember ObL was once our
ally, and to some degree 9/11 is the result of the United States “playing ball” with him: the landscape of that war abruptly changed, and the sudden withdrawal of US support left ObL feeling betrayed ... Jihad was declared, and the rest is history.
Groups such as these are not necessarily under a social contract. Nor have they unified methods -in fact they often operate
completely independently of each other, thus even attempts to appease them will draw unpredictable results. But if Pakistan -
much more accessible to middle-eastern “payback” both geographically and fiscally- wishes to handle this on their own, I feel we cannot and should not attempt to force it upon them.
They’ll figure it out eventually. Probably too late … But hey, we tried, right?
Eugenics: Sterilize
everybody. The temporary antidote is $1,000
cash, which you get back in the form of paying the emergency room bill and/or baby formula and diapers. Does this mean only people with money can have babies?
Yes it does.
Firstly, $1,000 is not exactly a princely sum. But it is enough for you to need a job (and presumably a car and a home) to have it.
I don’t really care if the money comes from relatives either. Grandparents desperate for grandkids? If they are that enamored with the concept they will fork out a grand, I’m fine with that. This money shows a level of commitment where it’s unlikely the child will end up a tool for a welfare dole, in an orphanage, or roving the streets in gangs to supplement the emotional void of apathetic and broken families.
Can’t raise $1,000? Can’t raise a baby. Period. I have it on good authority raising babies can be $1,500 -and sometimes even more.
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Consider: This game would be a lot easier
if we got it down to one fucking button. |
Economic Diversity: I have always felt a service-based economy is lunacy. If you buy an American product or service from an American, you have added nothing to the cash pool -you have merely changed where the money is locally. When -inevitably- you buy a foreign product or service, you have
removed that money from the pool. Thus if we sell nothing, our pool slowly shrinks. Like it or not, we are dependent on commerce from other countries to make our pool larger. In terms of labor we can’t compete with a lot of the world: if it costs half as much to create or service outside of the United States, guess what? That industry -and money- is going elsewhere.
But wasn’t this always true? From the 50s through the 70s -arguably an American ’heyday’ of sorts- we would compete on a global scale in terms of
quality. Everything we made was simply
better.
I was watching a classic sitcom the other day, and two men were bonding while repairing a toaster. I thought
repair? How quaint! Now it’s almost more practical to simply buy a new toaster … one that is just as likely to break down in a year as well. But wouldn’t you pay a little more for a toaster knowing it was likely to be the last toaster you ever need buy? Screw male bonding. Let’s get back to monosyllabic grunts between football plays.
I’ll go a little further on this and suggest it’s a good idea for this to be a migration-friendly country, especially with regard to foreign businesses and real estate. Both bring in more cash, making our pool bigger. Further, as an ancillary benefit, it gives other countries a vested interest in our overall well-being.
Marijuana: I would have done tedious “research” to bring out some specific dollar amounts, but every figure I came up with varied wildly from source to source. And all seemed shamelessly modified by the motives of the respective organization.
But when you imagine the cost of the misplaced law enforcement (and tools like helicopters, cars, et cetera), violator incarceration, attorneys, trials, facilitation of probation, ad nauseam, doesn’t it seem like a hefty pile of cash to spend busting a guy who only wants to watch cartoons and order Dominos’ Pizza?
And what the hell do these people have against Domino’s Pizza?
Defense Spending: I’m not going to make sweeping reformation suggestions here, because nobody knows better than me that our safety relies on having the best state-of-the-art board with the highest-tech nail in it.
But shrewdness is the watchword here. Would it kill us to occasionally buy scratch ‘n dent Apache helicopters? We all know an Apache helicopter decreases in value the second it leaves the showroom -so why aren’t we buying up the ones the Saudis only put a few thousand miles on before they became bored with it?
Boeing: Isn’t she a beauty? Formerly flown only ever-so-gently by a little old lady from Ethiopia.
America: What is the odometer reading?
Boeing: Fifty-six Bulgarians. Then she washed, waxed, and mothballed it. I doubt it has even needed an oil change yet.
America: [whistles] We’ll take it.
And while we’re on the subject, doesn’t Lockheed Martin issue coupons and customer loyalty discounts? We would get a lot more bang for our buck [literally] if we shopped for warheads and submarines on Double Coupon Day …
Predator Press
