January 11, 2019

“What Could You Do?”

-By Jim Culp

Our national debt is now at a staggering 22 trillion dollars. Yes, that is 22,000,000,000,000 in numbers if you prefer them. It is almost an unfathomable number to most people, and very few people ever stop one minute in their daily lives to ponder the magnitude of it.

About 33 years ago, I was in Korea. On a particular training event, we were sent out on top of a hill and told to defend it against our imaginary enemy. It was late summer, and in Korea that means rain, and a whole lot of it. I was sitting on the edge of my foxhole with two other guys, and we were bored out of our minds; so we bantered silly crap back and forth to one another the way most soldiers do.

One of my buddies suddenly blurted out with a great question…”Hey man, what would you do if you had a million dollars?”

I thought for minute, and said “well, I’d give my Mom and Pop some of it, and then my brothers and sisters some of it, and then I would buy a house and a new truck!”

Our Korean counterpart (being a college graduate and pretty good at math) quickly replied that I could do all that, but as long as I was frugal, I would still have a large amount of money left over.

“How much Sarge?” I said. He took out his green pocket book that supply issued us back in those days, and a fished a pen out of his other breast pocket.

“Well, dependent how big house and truck was, probably $700,000!”

“Holy shit!” I exclaimed.

“Well, I guess I’d want a boat too.” Having never fished the ocean at that age, I started thinking about bass boats that I had seen at the RV show. “That’d be about $2,500.”

Sergeant Kim laughed. “You’d still have a large amount of money left even then!”

We spent the next hour deciding how I would have done that, but I couldn’t think of much that could dwindle that number down very much.

I used that example for the following reason. It’s hard for an 18 year old kid that had D’s in arithmetic to fathom that much money.

It’s also hard for the same guy that is now 52 to ponder the magnitude of 22 trillion dollars.

So I broke it down really simple. What if I only had one percent (1%) of that amount?

Using my powerful third grade math, and then checking it with Google, I ascertain that 1% of that 22 trillion would come to 210 billion.

So then I think…what could I buy with that amount of money?

Well, here's just a few tiny items:

·         Repair every degraded bridge or over-pass in the six largest states of our nation and use them as future models for every one to follow.

·         Repair or replace every degraded highway and interstate in those same states.

·         Build housing, medical, and recreational facilities in every state of the nation for veterans to live in (free of charge) and participate in training and work programs.

·         Allocate a 20 year allotment to each of these programs for sustainability and productivity.

·         Build and fund colleges and training schools in every state of our nation to allow kids to attend free. Hire the best teachers and professors and pay them the money that they deserve for educating our children for us. A model of each of these would be present in every state for everyone to see how well a college works when money, religion, or sports are not the goal.

Right now I hear someone saying "Hey man...you'd already be out of money."

Hardly. Right now, I've spent 86 billion dollars. I've still got a plethora of funds sitting there to use.

I used this little ditty to show you, dear reader, what way less than a hundred  billion dollars could do on the grand scheme. But in this day and age, we talk trillions. Isn't it time that people wake up and see how badly we have been misled by using a government model where people are born in debt, live in debt, and die in debt? Don't you think that it is time for us to think about changing the way we do things? Lets dumb it back down. What would or could you do with just a million dollars?

Think about it.

-Jim  

Follow me at jimculp.blogspot.com