30 things I could have done with $39,190.81
November 19, 2009
As of 8:50 PM on this night, Wednesday the 19th of November, our national debt totals $12,043,819,854,073.75. AKA, about 12 trillion dollars. And each of us, including you and me, officially owes $39,190.81 to our creditors. Not as a whole do we owe this amount. We are each expected to pay that amount because our government is out of control.
Thus I present to you, 30 things I could have done with $39,190.81
30. Get another bachelor’s degree.
29. Get a master’s degree and a PhD.
28. Shut down a puppy mill.
27. Purchase a 2010 Lexus RX 350.
26. Feed 400 hungry American families.
25. Remodel my parents’ kitchen.
24. Build a small bungalow.
23. Pay back 2/3 of my student loans.
22. Take a vacation to Hawaii … 8 times.
21. Hire a maid and a butler.
20. Install 8 swimming pools.
19. Purchase about 52 of these.
18. Order 400 pounds of Godiva chocolate truffles.
17. Buy a California King Tempur-Pedic GrandBed mattress for everyone in my family.
16. Cover the cost of chemotherapy treatments for several struggling cancer patients.
15. Buy a laptop for everyone in Johnstown.
14. Fix 488 potholes.
13. Eat 1500 quarts of Tukery Hill’s Skinny Minty ice cream (and gain 560 pounds. Not joking. I did the math.)
12. House a homeless family.
11. Put 1000-thread count sheets on 390 beds.
10. Adopt at least one American child.
9. Take 181 hot air balloon rides.
8. Buy a hot air balloon.
7. Start a small business.
6. Take my family to Super Bowl XLIV.
5. Swim around in it (just because)
4. Rent a beach condo for 26 weeks.
3. Hire a part-time assistant for several years.
2. Buy a dozen horses. Just for kicks. GET IT? Because horses kick people sometimes.
1. Make my backyard look like this.
Perspective, people. Perspective. Start being pissed off if you aren’t already.
Not sure which post to put this comment under, but figured I’d toss this out here – maybe it will receive a better reception than on facebook:
I admit I don’t know much about the healthcare or medical fields. I do understand business, however, so I wanted to take on the issue of Medical Rationing from a business standpoint. I feel the similarities are enough for this to be an accurate representation. I’m sure I will be told that I am simplying this too much, but I challenge that notion.
Anyway. Let’s say you are the CEO of Lego, everyone’s favorite childhood toy. For reasons beyond this example, your company only makes Lego houses. It’s great. Kids get a foundation, walls, and a roof to build with all the Legos. The design is revolutionary and the materials it is made from are one of a kind. Being the nationalist you are, you decide to only ship the product within the United States. Despite this, it’s such a great product that people flock from other countries into the US to buy it.
One day, the Government decides that Lego houses are so great, that everyone deserves to have them, and at lower than current market price. They also deserve to have a new lego house each year. In this scenario, this would mean having to ship out an additional 40 million Lego houses on a yearly basis. While this sounds like a great idea, production has peaked due to the number of specialized machinists you currently have on staff. There is no way you can produce 40 million additional Lego houses (and sell it at a lower price) without cutting some corners.
So you have a few options. You HAVE to produce these 40 million additional Lego houses. You cannot back out of it. The government has made it law. Here are your choices…and you can do any number of them:
1) Labor. You have machinists that create the lego houses. It takes 6 years to properly train a machinist to make the Lego house. In order to churn out more, you could take some of the machinist assistants (typically 2-4 years experience) and put them on the production line. This will get you the additional houses, however, the quality will decrease significantly. Some of the lego houses may be missing pieces and others may break within weeks of production. This can also cause extreme delays in shipment of the product as replacements are constantly being built.
2) You can pour additional money into technology to automate the machinists tasks. This solution is many years off and arguably could raise the cost of Lego houses in the short and mid-term due to the high upfront costs incurred for R&D.
3) You can start shipping out the Lego houses without the foundations and roofs. Those materials will be used to make the walls for the 40 million Lego houses, and the machinists will not spend as much time on each lego house. After all, kids can just use their imagination for the foundations and roofs, right? This will allow you to make the houses AND drop the cost of each house.
4) You can replace some of the material with cheaper (and cheaper quality) material. You can keep the foundations and roofs, but the addition of the cheaper material can make the lego house toxic to some, causing them to fall ill. The cheaper material is MUCH easier to work with and reduces the amount of time each machinist spends on a lego house. This will allow you to make the houses AND drop the cost of each house.
I fail to see how this situation is any different than the one we are getting ourselves into. A lego house is our healthcare system. We’re tossing 40 million additional people into the healthcare system without adding doctors/staff/doctor’s offices. Yes, they can still use all the ER’s, but we constantly hear how understaffed they are, and one of the big arguments behind this bill is if people have insurance and a doctor’s office, they won’t crowd the ER’s. Paralleling the above statements…
1) I’m concerned the infrastructure and resources are not available….which would lead to delays in medical vists. We can churn out more med students to make up for this -not requiring residency or as many years of med school, but is that a great idea? I think we can all agree that quality of care would decrease and people would be filling up the doctor’s offices when unqualified (at least in today’s standards) physicians are providing subpar treatment options.
2) We can invest money into new technologies, vaccines and preventative medicine. I love it. Great idea. But how high are the chances of us seeing those benefits within the next 10 years…you know, when it’s going to cost $1 trillion for healthcare? You have to understand that an extra $1 trillion over 10 years could cause a catastrophic failure of the US dollar. That cannot be acceptable to any reasonable person.
3) Another idea is to start telling people that they don’t need examinations as often or be tested as rigorously as normal. After all, tests take time and money, and in order to see the 40 million additional patients, they have to get people in and out of the office. Also, to make sure costs are low, they need to reduce many of those pesky test.
4) The last idea is to take shortcuts in how procedures are done, how long hospital stays are, etc. There are only so many rooms in the hospitals and they’ve got to get to all the patients, so hospital stays could be shortered. Procedures could cut corners to finish them faster and do them more cheaply (re-use equipment or buy the low quality, less expensive kind).
I’m not saying all of this WILL happen. I’m saying it MIGHT. Everyone should be asking questions of their Senators and Congressmen and more importantly, demanding answers back! We should make sure we have the resources in place so that the quality of healthcare does not decline. I want to see some numbers from the House and Senate guaranteeing this.
I’m getting tired of the old argument of “You just want people to die! Everyone deserves health care! It’s a basic human right!” I’m just thinking of if/when the country runs itself into the ground due to debt, when inflation is out of control so few can afford basic goods, let alone healthcare – will we still think this was such a great idea?
JD, excellent points. I don’t think you have to be an expert in the medical field to understand the harm government run health care can do. You need common sense. And anyone with common sense can understand that any action has a reaction. in this case, the action is more and more people having access to healthcare. The reaction is mediocre health care, crowded waiting rooms, longer delays in appointments, understaffed clinics, etc. Sure, everyone would have health are, but we’ll all be lesser off.
I will respond more to this later, i have to go to Eat n Park. Like I have to. But this was a great response.