Arithmetic for Americans.
First, local, state and federal governments spend about $21,000 for every man, woman and child in the US. That’s the baseline.
I’m always surprised when people get frosted about the US spending their hard-earned dollars (their emphasis) on that.. (and they’ll sputter for a second) art. When people in America are starving! (Somewhere, they’re sure, although they never really cared enough to find out where, or do anything about that.)
It’s one of those oddly tribal things. Except that it isn’t ‘your hard-earned dollars’ so much as ‘your hard-earned four bits’. Almost. And if I put that money back in your hand, it’s not like you’d give to someone begging. Who knows what he might do with it!
That’s 47 cents out of a budget of $21,000 per person.
And Trump says he’ll cut that four bits to pay for his defense increase of around $17 per person. What? Maybe it’s rich guy’s math; what do I know?
Germany spends around $20 per person on arts, and they have much better healthcare and personal satisfaction than we do. And they have a great military, too. Maybe they’re on to something? I bet if we shifted Trump’s military budget to the arts, we’d see something wonderful.
Art certainly makes more sense that pumping more into the military-industrial complex. Honestly, if the last $1.7 trillion wasn’t enough, I can’t see a few billion more doing much. We already spend about a third of every defense dollar on earth, every single year. Add up the cost of the next eight largest military budgets and they still don’t reach up to what we spend.
How many guns do you need to buy? How inadequate can one man really be? Well, I guess if you’re our president, the answer is: never. I mean, damn, Orangie McLittleHands is insecure about everything!
Now Trump paints himself as an isolationist. I’d hoped that might at least save us from military overreach. Why spend more if you’re talking about packing it all in? No such luck there, though it’s no big surprise. It’s not like he didn’t lie about everything else he promised.
Wait. I know! Compare the arts budget to the bank bailout that Bush started and Obama managed. Propublica did the math. Tote up every dollar we spent on the banks, subtract whatever few pennies we got back after buying all their toxic assets, and the difference came out to $75.8 billion, or $23 for every single American.
In profit. The TARP fund earned back more that it spent. We made money from it. I admit, I was surprised by that.
So, yeah, this budget noise is all hogwash. And the people throwing it in front of you know that. Perfectly well. Hell, they laugh about it to each other, then shovel out more of the slop.
