A friend sent me something the other day that had been passed around on the Internet regarding one guy’s idea about how to use the $85 billion the federal government intended to use for bailing out AIG.
He suggested that the money be given to each U.S. citizen over 18 as a national dividend. His math came out with $425,000 each. Whether his math was correct or not doesn’t concern me. I have always liked such an idea. I think it would be a great social experiment for the United States. Other nations have giveaways of one type or the other. We got the $600 or more earlier this year although I wouldn’t call it a giveaway. The government has been getting the better of us for years. Well, at least most of us.
I doubt any type of big dividend such as the Internet guy proposed could ever happen here. Our society has some type of aversion to mass gifts for its own people. That is true sometimes even if these gifts are in order to help those either with misfortune or dwindling fortune.
While it is true large philanthropists such as Bill Gates do great things for his own at times, especially when it comes to giving out technological hardware (hmm, I bet he doesn’t have any of that lying around anywhere), Gates is one of the American celebrities who feels compelled to send as much of his money to Africa as possible. There is no doubt the terrible hardships and tragedy that citizens of some African nations have endured.
(oops premature eblogulation there — I published before I finished).
But smart people like Gates and others can’t deny that we have our own poor, weary, malnourished, hurting, homeless, whatever in our own country. And it isn’t just those people you see everyday, the street people. Some of those people are poor and some are just bums. I know because, as some of you may recall, I was living in my pickup truck only last year. Then, there are many, many people who aren’t seen who are in all different manners of being poor or broke. The likelihood of there being many more now because of the economic crisis is a pretty good bet.
I don’t know if our Puritan background had anything to do with that way of thinking or not. I’d like to think not, mainly because even though I am of Scotch-Irish-English heritage, I consider myself a Texan with our state being more rooted in the Spanish Catholic ways. In other words, I don’t really know why Americans only give to our own when the bottom has already fallen out of their lives. Why not try to do something before economic catastrophes — in the personal sense — occur rather than after?
Not that anyone will listen to me, other than folks such as the guy who thinks the government should have given everyone $425,000. If that didn’t stimulate the economy, or overstimulate the economy (which I have no idea what circumstances good or bad that might bring) I don’t know what will.