Say What?

Your proposal was not as clear to me at 10:00 PM as it was to you at 7:00 AM. Are you proposing to give each household, one dollar, two dollars, or whatever it takes to move them above the official poverty level, or are you proposing to give each poor person $10,000? Either way, are you proposing to give them this money just once, or once a year? If you give it to them just once, it will only move them out of poverty for one year, so I'm assuming that you want to give it to them every year. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Assuming that it's $10,000 a year, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our military to raise that kind of money, all we'd have to do is bring them home and put them to work defending our own borders instead of everybody else's borders. Most of our military seems to be National Guard these days anyway, and they are already supposed to be defending our nation instead of everybody else's nations. I'm not sure when they changed that, but they should change it back.

My next question is, How much money are we already spending on the various programs for the poor? Is your proposal intended to replace that, or add to it? If you want to add to it, your proposal just might work. The way our economy is heading, we may all be on the dole eventually anyway. Since 70% of the economic activity in this country is consumer spending, and they don't want to pay us to work anymore, they will have to find some other way to put money in all of our pockets or the whole economy will eventually collapse. There is no way that 1% of the people can support 70% of the economy forever, regardless of how rich they are. They must already have almost everything they want, so how much more stuff can they buy? If our economy goes down, the Red Chinese economy goes down too, and you know they aren't going to let that happen.

My Indian counting project is moving along slowly. I managed to track down the number for the smaller tribe, 1026, which is about half of what I expected. The larger tribe in the U.P. wanted me to put my request in writing, and they said email was okay. They also wanted to know what I intended to do with the information, and I told them. I have not received a reply yet, and I'm beginning to think I'm not going to. You never know with those Indians, though. They like to do things at their own speed, and they often joke about being on "Indian time". My daughter explained that those traditionalists are probably all enrolled in one tribe or another, so we don't want to count them twice. She also told me there is yet another tribe that I need to count, The Grand Traverse Band, not to be confused with The Little Traverse Band, which I have already counted. As their name implies, they are a larger outfit, but I don't know how many of them live in our two counties.

I will have to track them down on the internet because their headquarters is in Traverse City, which is not in our phone book. Remember when you could call "information" to get out of town phone numbers? I don't know when they stopped having that, but they did. The way I found the other two was by calling their casinos, at the suggestion of my hypothetical wife. The casino in St. Ignace was able to patch me in to their headquarters in the Sault, but the one in Petoskey was not. Petoskey is in our phone book, but the only other number listed besides the casino was the tribal police. I apologized for bothering them with something like this, but they were happy to patch me in to their headquarters, where I talked to the tribal chairman, who patched me in to the lady in charge of enrollment. She had left for the day, even though her machine said the office was open till 5:00 and it was only 4:00 when I called , so I left a message and she returned my call the next business day, which was Monday.