Lots of people in America love to talk about how we need campaign reform, but very few people ever put into perspective what you can actually do with the amount of money being spent on these ridiculous campaigns.
Romney and Obama combined for about 1.8 billion dollars in campaign contributions for the 2012 election but that’s only part of the story. It’s been estimated that a total of 8 billion dollars was spent if you include the Senate and House campaigns.
So let’s do some math and figure out what you can really do with a measly 8 billion.
What could we do with unemployment? Well first off let’s go with the national median salary which is around $39,000. We don’t need to provide more “entitlement qualified” minimum wage workers, so let’s at least try to get our workers to the middle class level. Fair enough? If we paid each of our workers $39,000 we could employ 205,128 people for the next 12 months. Hopefully at the end of those twelve months these people would have produced enough goods that our business would be able to stand on its own and future earnings would be paid out of profits. “Profit” is a word we don’t mention much anymore when talking about American business. A profit is simply when a business brings in more money than what it spends. A lot of our younger readers have never heard of profitable companies so I thought I should clarify. What a quaint idea? What if we actually paid people to produce something rather than paying corrupt individuals billions of dollars to continue to run our country into the ground?
Maybe you have a compassionate heart…good for you…how many people could we feed for 8 billion dollars? Hey, you are talking to an expert shopper and accomplished pauper. I know how cheap it is to eat in this country. Keep in mind that I have lived most of my life in the midwest so I can’t speak for other regions, but in this area of the country you can survive for about $5 a day. Yes you might eat lots of hot dogs, mac-n-cheese, ramen noodles, popcorn, canned vegetables, cheap bread, generic brands, etc. But I am living proof that it can be done. $5 a day can get you fat, you can actually eat for much less. But for the sake of this example we will go with $5 a day. That means that the average poor person can eat on $1825 a year (365 days). Doing the math, for a measly 8 billion you could feed 4,383,561 poor folks for the next year.Â
I am a firm believer in “teaching men to fish” instead of “giving them fish” so how many men could you teach to fish for 8 billion? Well we are going to have to provide them with poles and jigs and flies and jellyworms, etc But, being the expert shopper I am, I could probably get everyone a good starter kit for about $50. Next we could hire some expert fishermen to give a lesson for about $50 per participant. Hey if 100 people attend each fishing seminar then the expert fisherman (or fisherwoman) just earned $5,000 (and we just provided a few jobs too). We also sent Bass Pro Shops a crap load of business, which also provided some jobs. The instructors will do it for 5 grand. No problem. So we have $100 invested in each new fisher-person. Wow, that’s some pretty simple math. We have enough money to teach 80,000,000 people to fish. But that’s silly…that could cause a serious fish shortage in this country, especially if they all show up at the local lakes, ponds and streams every weekend. Maybe we should teach 40 million people to fish and take half the money and invest it in stocking our waterways with more fish. Not sure if that will work so let’s look around at other ideas. I’m willing to wheel and deal. There is no gridlock with me, I want solutions.
So maybe we’d offer similar options to teach people to grow their own gardens, raise their own livestock, hunt, etc. Otherwise the world fish shortage might cause serious ecological problems and we don’t want to mess with Mother Nature. Plus, who wants to eat fish every damn day? I don’t. Well i do like Tuna Salad, but we don’t have Tuna in Missouri, so it just wouldn’t be fair to me at all. We need something that’s fair for everyone.
How many homes could we build and pay off? Prices have dropped for some reason in recent years so now is the time to act. We can get new homes for about $225,000 right now, but we need to act fast because prices are likely to drop again, and that just screws up the math. Bad math leads to bad policies. We could buy 35,555 families new homes and have them paid off for life. Not sure how we’d figure out which families to pick but since it was my idea, I am on the list for sure. I have a family. We need a free home. I’m sure we can find more people in that situation, even in a great country like this.
Ooh ooh ooh…here’s a good idea… Since we bailed out the banks once (getting ready to drop some f-bombs %$@*&)…breathe Dean… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10…
OK better, it will stay a PG post for the moment. Since we bailed out the banks once, why don’t we bail them out again? But let’s do it a little differently this time. Let’s take an average Joe with about $10,000 in credit card debt. We will strengthen the banks if he can pay those debts, and we will help Joe out too. What a novel idea? Let’s bail out Joe and the bank at the same time. I wonder why no one thought about that the last time? Joe is still scratching his head. So we need, $10,005 (the extra 5 bucks for shampoo in case it’s just Joe’s dandruff). We can help Joe plus 799,599 of his friends pay off their credit cards. We can seriously help the bottom line at lots of big ass banks which will hopefully lower interest rates. As a bonus we will provide some jobs for a company that makes a damn good dandruff shampoo. I have no idea how many people it’s going to take for almost 800,000 bottles but it sounds like a few jobs for sure. Hey Obama…check this shit out. It’s my job stimulus package. Better than yours…you dumb ass. Oh I’m sorry, he is our President. I think I’m supposed to call him “Dumb-Ass-in-Chief” or something like that. I don’t know. I’m not good at political correctness. All I really call it is an Obama-nation. It’s obama-nable what is happening all around us.
How many people could we provide healthcare to? I think about 5 because healthcare costs in this country are insane, so we need to find another option. What we could do is saturate the market with new doctors and drive the prices down. Supply and demand my friends. So i think it costs like $300.000 in educational expenses for someone to become a medical doctor. We can put 26,666 new doctors through school. Wait a minute… If we are paying for that many medical students we can surely get a discount. We will work out deals with Stanford and UCLA and whoever the hell makes good doctors. That’s just good business. We will get a packaged deal and get about 40,000 new doctors which is enough to put 800 new M.D.’s in each state. Some states will get more because of population differences of course. Believe me, I have thought this shit out, it will work. Either way, when there are that many doctors running around, you will get some cheap ass deals on medical procedures. We will even take a couple million and throw it to priceline.com to make sure the competition is fierce. You will be able to bid on cheap vasectomies and all kinds of cool stuff. More vasectomies will mean less unplanned pregnancies which means each family will save more money, and be able to invest 12-14 billion in 2016 for my new stimulus ideas. But wait…I’m getting way ahead of myself.
I’m starting to get silly, but maybe you have a few visuals now of what 8 billion dollars will actually buy. How much will be spent in 2016? 12 billion? 20 billion? No one wants to take any of these ideas seriously because I’m being flippant and not very p.c. Yet we can take these men and women seriously who simply waste our money, day after day, year after year? It has to stop my friend.
This has to stop, and it has to stop now. With a country in financial tatters it makes absolutely no sense to be spending this kind of money to elect candidates or re-elect candidates that have no real eye for solutions. America is a mess. I don’t care if you are democrat or republican, it has been proven for the last 20 years or so that neither party knows WTF they are doing. So why are we wasting all of this money on campaigns for public “servants” who don’t have a clue? Talk about welfare. People can bitch about welfare recipients all they want but the biggest welfare recipients in this country reside in Washington D.C. They get paid to produce absolutely nothing in measurable results. Sounds like welfare to me.
I personally prefer the national pizza party idea. Obama and Romney spent 1.8 billion dollars worth of contributions to buy roughly 120 million total votes. That’s about $15 per vote. I can get 3 hot-n-ready pizzas from Little Caesar’s for $15. That would be enough money to throw one hell of a national pizza party.
Just give me a $15 check, you guys are buying votes anyway. Furthermore, if the government threw a pizza party I’m pretty sure all of us would be lucky to get one stinking slice. Even worse, we would all get cheese while they tried to hide from us that they were all chowing down the supremes. These guys are really starting to piss me off.
WTF is wrong with this country when guys are willing to spend 1.8 billion to fight for a job that pays $400,000 a year? Shit let’s just hire extra presidents and screw the campaign money. For that 1.8 billion dollars we could provide damn good jobs to 1,125 new presidents for the next 4 years. Now I think I’m onto something. Why the hell is there only one president anyway? I will try to tackle that subject in a future post. In preparation for that idea I am going to need 1,124 volunteers. Feel free to use the comment section below for just that purpose. Or if you disagree you are free to voice that opinion too.
