Friday, July 31, 2009

What Would You Do with $550B?

This is a serious question. The interest payments on our national debt are about $550B. That means we are still paying for aircraft carriers built in the 1990s, education bureaucrats' salaries paid out in the 2000s and farm subsidies from who knows when. Since we refused to buy only what we had earned and instead bought on credit, we are now paying $550B on previous years' goodies.

What if we hadn't done that? What if we'd behaved like grown-ups? What would you do with $550B?

Personally, I'd recapitalize the Navy (our ships are old and growing more expensive to maintain all the time), I would increase NASA's budget by a factor of 10 (because spaceships are cool) and I would pay Dave Ramsey $1B to create a K-12 mandatory curriculum for all students in all schools to educate them about how to handle money.

I'd then give the rest back to the taxpayers under the assumption that if they earned it, they might have some idea how to spend it.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I'd give it back to the taxpayers (ironically 40% of it would go to 1% of the taxpayers), THEN ask them to fund these other exercises.

Perhaps a billion dollars to Dave Ramsey wouldn't be necessary if people saw a responsible government.

I'm just stupid that way

(untice)