Leave It For the Night Crew

Stop me if you've heard this one:
A little boy was hanging around the house getting in his mother's way, so she suggested that he go to a nearby construction site and see what he could learn by watching the men work. When the boy returned, he offered to demonstrate what he had learned that day. He told his mother to hold on to one end of a long piece of string while he held the other end, stretched it tight, and sighted down its length. "Just a cunt hair to the left," the boy said, which resulted in him being sent to bed without any supper. His mother repented of her harsh action after thinking about it for awhile and realizing that the boy had just repeated, in good faith, what he had heard. She fixed up a tray of food for the boy and brought it to him. She told him that she was sorry that she had over reacted and asked him if he wanted some supper after all. The boy's laconic reply was, "Fuck it, leave it for the night crew."

I think I understand your plan better now, but I still have some questions. When they classify somebody's income as being below the poverty level, do they count the government assistance he is already getting as income? I know that some programs, when determining eligibility, only count your income, while others count both your income and your assets. I think that, basically, you want to bring everybody marginally above the poverty level. This would reduce the number of poor people on paper, but would their lives be noticeably better as a result?

Last I heard, they were paying single mothers based on how many kids they had, which gives them an incentive to have more kids, which means more poor people in the next generation. My plan addresses that issue, while your plan does not. Don't get me wrong, I still like your plan better than mine, if only for the reason that it your plan has a better chance of actually being passed someday. Hitler gave mass sterilization a bad name, and some people haven't gotten over it yet. I think that Hitler had people castrated, while all I want to do is tie off their tubes, but the public still may not be ready for my plan yet. You might be right that, as people's incomes rise, the birth control will take care of itself. There's an old saying about birth control that the people who need it most use it least.

I believe there is more money to be saved by bringing our boys home than you think. Most of the units stationed overseas seem to be National Guard now. They are paid more when they are deployed like that than when they are home being weekend warriors. They are rotated in and out of those overseas assignments at six to twelve month intervals, and they have to be transported both ways. I don't know if they bring their vehicles and artillery with them or if they just relieve the other guys in place and use their gear. As Napoleon said, "An army travels on its stomach." I don't know how much food is bought locally and how much is shipped from the U.S., but anything bought locally is plowing money into their economy instead of ours. I know you don't believe this, but G.I.s spend a lot of money downtown and, the longer they are in the field, the more they spend when they do hit the streets. That's one reason why the locals cry bloody murder whenever a military base is closed down. The other reason is that there are lots of civilian jobs on a military base. While the G.I.s handle most of the clean-up work, there is all kinds of building and grounds maintenance that's done by civilians. Last I heard, they were even contracting out routine military duties like compound guard and K.P. to free up the troops for combat assignments. There was a big scandal awhile back about a U.S. company called Halliburton screwing up jobs like this, but I don't know if anything ever came of it.

You're basically right about how the circulation of money fuels the economy, but don't forget that every dollar spent in another country is fueling their economy when it could be fueling ours.