A Billion Dollars

I recently was asked what I would do if I had a Billion Dollars. I had to rant:

I am so glad you ask this question. I wonder what kinds of responses you get. You know, there was a time in the late 1990's when I would take my friends for walks around Alexandria or Georgetown and talk to them about what they were seeing. I would make them aware that at that time, during the immense amount of money flowing into technology, with N. VA building massive businesses like AOL, UUNet, Nextel, PSI Net and hundreds of others, they would never see the kind of wealth they were seeing at the time again potentially in their lifetimes. I would share stories of Dot Com start up CEO's giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to start research facilities, universities, even one guy that granted $500 million to the state of Mississippi to help them get off the bottom of the list in America in education. It was incredible.

And I would ask my friends and those I met, "What would you do if you could accomplish something, anything, and money was not an object?" I never got a real answer. They only people doing anything really over the top with what seemed like unlimited money were the guys recreating Paris, Venice, NYC, and Rome in the dessert of Nevada in a place called Las Vegas. Yea, sad isn't it. Like "Back to the Future" where Biff runs the show and everything in town becomes a casino (which is exactly happened in the first decade of 21st Century), the lowest common mentality becomes the dominant force in life. Meanwhile, start up companies burned out. Their great ideas could not take off when the vast majority of America was still getting Internet through dial up.

California and other western states were being held hostage by energy traders who exploited the decrepit state of power delivery in this country to rake taxpayers out of billions. Their company also collapsed, it was called Enron. And in the course of 10 years, from the early 1990's, 50% of Americans were all convinced to buy trucks (relabeled SUV's to make them palatable to consumers) and reverse 15 years of declining per-capita energy use just as some doorknob of a president was about to start a major war that would nearly bankrupt anyone with a truck that got 14 miles to the gallon.

So, why, in a nation so rich, where we have somewhere near 1,000 billionaires, do the average people sit with $13 trillion in debt they will have to pay from their hard earned money for the next 100 years and absolutely NOTHING to show for it? No high speed, convenient, affordable rail systems connecting towns and cities, a crumbling infrastructure of roads and bridges across the country, water and energy delivery infrastructure that is falling apart with much of it 3/4 of a century old or older, telecommunications networks that leave us at the bottom of the list of developed nations, no national health system, the vast majority of Americans falling further behind on the economic scale, and a loss of an average of 200,000 production oriented jobs a year for the last 10 years.

So what would I do with a $ 1 billion?

a) Get the hell out of this country and go live in a civilized advanced nation somewhere

b) Work my ass off to replace all the idiots that legislate this country and replace them with people who have a backbone and are willing to set us on a course of prosperous First World Nation instead of turning us into some kind of banana republic with big guns and a loud mouth.

Yea, that is what I would do. You?

State of the Union, Do I Sense Frustration?

Sometimes I listen to the State of the Union speech, mostly I read it. I like reading anything that carries importance. It is better internalized and I see the nuances to the writing. This year I noticed a kind of frustration evident in a choice word used in the speech. Now, I know our President must be very dissatisfied with the garbage "Health Care Reform Bill" which in my opinion should be trashed as a watered down document not worth the paper it is written on, and that goes to for the bill that was supposed to reform our broken financial system. That bill is even worse. It does nothing to address the root cause of the financial meltdown. But without going into detail here, I sensed the President's frustration when I read this:

We should have no illusions about the work ahead of us. Reforming our schools, changing the way we use energy, reducing our deficit — none of this will be easy. All of it will take time. And it will be harder because we will argue about everything. The costs. The details. The letter of every law.


Of course, some countries don't have this problem. If the central government wants a railroad, they build a railroad, no matter how many homes get bulldozed. If they don't want a bad story in the newspaper, it doesn't get written.

The word "problem" should have been "process". To use problem is to imply that the messy democratic process is a problem and that dictatorship is preferable to solving problems.

It should be noted that this was a very poor choice of a word here.