the morning crew raises questions

I've heard that joke in some form somewhere before.  One bad thing about  growing old is you've heard all the jokes.  One thing I liked about subbing was these kids had only been on the earth about ten years and hadn't heard much of anything.  Once, passing out papers I said, on a whim, to a particularly surly kid, "Don't say I never gave you anything," and the whole class cracked up, what a clever teacher, how had he thought that up.

I'm not all that serious about my plan, but it does follow my general thesis, if we want to help the poor, let's give them stuff.  And we are all spitballing here anyway aren't we?  I don't know if that Assistant Secretary of Planning and Evaluation was taking into account how much these poor people were getting on welfare, I suspect not because that amount can vary.  I don't think the guy who gets one buck would find much change in his life, but the guy who got five thousand would.

Of course the Assistant Secretary could decide at any time to raise the poverty determination level and then we would be back in the soup.  Is there an absolute level that can be determined for who is poor and who is not, or do we just sort of assume that the lower twenty percent, say, are always the poor? 

Nobody gets rich by having more babies.  However much more money they get it is probably not even going to cover the cost of that extra baby, let alone leave enough money on the side for the welfare queen to ride around her brood around in a welfare Cadillac. 

Well why do they do it?  Well I don't know.  Well they are young and stupid, which even a couple wise old men like ourselves have to admit we once were, and I am thinking just off the top of my head, that we would have played our part in any of these unwed teen pregnancies without thinking twice. 

While having babies at a young age certainly contributes to poverty, it is not the only cause, maybe it should be considered a separate issue.  It is a more interesting topic though because instead of a lot of boring numbers with all those zeros trailing behind them, it is about sex.  If babies came out of cabbage patches, a lot of these irresponsible young girls wouldn't go there, but sex on the other hand, people want to do it, our basic biological drives want us to do it, we are fighting nature to try to keep it from happening.

Well back to numbers.  I really don't think we will save all that much by bringing the boys home.  But I will concede there will be some savings, and I think it's generally a good idea. 

And of course you are right that with our troops come a lot of money.  I think that is the main reason the locals want us in Afghanistan, all the money we spend, all the people we hire, all the bribes we make.  There is the story about one of the first Americans to come to Afghanistan, and he asked one of the locals, "Boy you guys sure hated the Russians didn't you?"  The guy replied, "Are you kidding me, look at those roads, look at those hospitals, the Russians built all that, we loved the Russians."  "But," the puzzled American asked, "You were constantly killing them, you drove them out."  The Afghan shrugged, "Well they were occupying our country."

Halliburton did end up in doodoo, there was another one, Blackwater, that was driven out of business, but I think they just mainly changed their name, and in both cases some little guys paid the price while the cheeses sat in their counting houses counting all their money.

What do you think about that privatizing of the war?  It kind of fit into that libertarian let private enterprise do everything mindset, but in actual fact it led to friends of the guys running the war making a lot of money.  And it always seemed flawed at the heart.  Don't you want your own guys defending your army and not guys you are paying to do it? 

That last paragraph it sounds like you are talking about money as a zero sum thing, like if a dollar is in another country it can't be in ours, but in fact money is elastic.  I think we talked about this one at length at some point in our correspondence, but I am not sure if we came to any conclusions.  Well how often do we come to any conclusions?

But anyway it seems like the more money there is in one country, the more money there is in every other country.  When Greece goes down the tubes it doesn't make Germany richer, it makes Germany poorer.  We are all taking in each others laundry aren't we?  If some country can't pay to have their laundry done anymore don't we have less money coming in? 

It can't be that simple.  But then maybe it can.