One Small, But Expensive, Step for Mankind (And 10 Other Things That You Could Do With A Trillion Bucks)1
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Republican Presidential contender Newt Gingrich wants to build a colony on the moon by the end of his second term.
I’m assuming you’ve probably already heard about this… but I’m still going to let it set in.
Just another minute…Please really let it set in that the former speaker of the house back in the ‘90s that was booted out of the Congress for ethics violations, paid a $300k fine, has had 3 wives, got paid over a million dollars from Fannie and Freddie for being a ‘historian’ wants to build a colony on the moon at the end of his second term.
Oh, not the whole colony on the moon thing…I’m talking about the fact that he thinks he’s going to have not only a first term, but a second one.
Ok. So now that you’ve wrapped your head around that – let’s ponder the putting people on the moon thing, for permanent like.
I’ll wait for you. The man who wants to cut pretty much every social program from the country’s budget would like to, it seems, at government expense send a bunch of people from Ohio to the moon (look it up, like every freaking astronaut is from Ohio, it’s weird). You know, cause flights to the moon are cheap as shit….I think Southwest has a hub there now.
Well not exactly.
It’s actually estimated to be INCREDIBLY UNBELIEVABLY EXPENSIVE (note to editor, keep the caps)…like solve world hunger expensive, like Iraq War expensive – well, actually, not that expensive.
Slate.com estimates the cost would be around a TRILLION DOLLARS.
Yes, that’s trillion with a T.
(Why do I have the unconscious need to place my pinky finger to the edge of mouth every time I type ‘a trillion dollars’… damn you Michael Myers)
Let me type that out for you.
$1,000,000,000,000
That’s four f**king commas.
Ok, so let’s ignore the absurdities of it all and have some fun with the money.
After we’ve all had our turn in the Scrooge McDuck money vault – let’s get spending.
10 Things You Could Do With A Trillion Bucks
2. Pay For 7,541,478 Very Expensive Divorces
3. Employ 16,666,666 Full Time Janitors For A Year
4. Buy 128,865,979,381 Copies of Saul Alinski’s Rules for Radicals
(Enough for about 1/3rd of the US Population.)
5. Pay Off 1/15th Of The National Debt
6. Pick Up The Tab For The “Additional Cost” Of “ObamaCare” For About 10 Years
(This, of course, doesn’t take into account many different factors that would save the country money.)
7. Pay For Private Health Care For 299,065,420 Americans For One Year
(Albeit, calculated at an average cost of $13,375 per family of four.)
8. Pay For The Infrastructure For California’s High Speed Rail Network – Ten Times Over!!!
(And we only need to do it once, so we’d have created lots of jobs and still have oodles of cash to spare. Studies show that for every $1 billion spent on infrastructure remediation creates between 18,000 and 34,000 jobs – via Barry LePatner, author of Too Big to Fail: America’s Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward.)
10. Pay Off Everyone’s Student Debt
(“If you erase the debt record, we all go back to zero.”)
And one extra…
I’m required by contract (not really) to mention that you could also buy SuicideGirls subscriptions for every American for the next 94 years! [I think we could arrange a special bulk purchase ‘buy 94 get 100 years’ deal for the US government – Ed!]
Zach D. Roberts is a photo/video journalist who’s work has been seen in the Observer, The Guardian Online, TheNation.com, The Minnesota Independent, among others. For the past 5 years he’s been working as a researcher/producer for Greg Palast. He produced several DVD’s and news pieces for the BBC’s Newsnight show. Zach edited Palast and RFK Jr’s Steal Back Your Vote comic – which had nearly 100,000 downloads and print copies distributed throughout the world). Currently he works regularly as a video producer for Jamie Kilstein and Allison Kilkenny’s CitizenRadio.
Zach has been detained in New Orleans by Exxon Mobil security, threatened with arrest over three dozen times but has never been arrested. In 2010 he met Sarah Palin while working on his soon to be released first feature length documentary ‘The Rogue Candidate: Sarah Palin’s Real Alaska.’ While in Alaska he broke several stories via TheMudflats.net. For more visit his website, Facebook, and Twitter.
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