Today’s inflation news… “It Now Costs $300,000 to Raise a Child” (Wall Street Journal):
The cost of raising a child through high school has risen to more than $300,000 because of inflation that is running close to a four-decade high, according to a Brookings Institution estimate.
It determined that a married, middle-income couple with two children would spend $310,605—or an average of $18,271 a year—to raise their younger child born in 2015 through age 17. The calculation uses an earlier government estimate as a baseline, with adjustments for inflation trends.
Let’s combine that with “Where $5 Trillion in Pandemic Stimulus Money Went” (Pravda, May 11):
Stimulus bills approved by Congress beginning in 2020 unleashed the largest flood of federal money into the United States economy in recorded history. Roughly $5 trillion went to households, mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, airlines, hospitals, local governments, schools and other institutions around the country grappling with the blow inflicted by Covid-19.
Even at today’s inflated costs, therefore, if we hadn’t decided to spend all of our current and future savings on coronapanic we could have fully funded 16.6 million children in middle class families, a group that doesn’t tend to have children. This chart from 2019 shows that low-income Americans, who get taxpayer-funded housing sized for whatever families they choose to create, and high-income Americans, who are rich enough to buy family-sized houses, are the ones that have kids:
That’s considering only direct federal spending. Can we guess that at least another $5 trillion was spent and/or sacrificed via state governors’ lockdown orders? Now we’re up to being able to fund 33+ million middle class kids. There are only about 70 million children at all income levels in the U.S. right now. Roughly half of school kids are poor enough to get free or reduced-price lunch (NCES) and, therefore, presumably are entitled to other programs that used to be called “welfare”. So the coronapanic spending, at both state and federal levels, would have been enough to fund 100 percent of American children, for their entire childhood, whose childhoods are not already being funded by taxpayers.
Related:
- “Scandal-hit Hunter Biden ‘agreed to pay baby mama $2.5 million” (The Sun, October 2020) shows that the stripper-turned-family-court-plaintiff, even if she failed to invest the $2.5 million in an inflation-protecting manner, will still get a $2.2 million profit off Joe Biden’s granddaughter (when will this kid be invited to the White House? Grandpa is not getting any younger or more energetic!)
- “Prosecutors Struggle to Catch Up to a Tidal Wave of Pandemic Fraud” (NYT): “… one of the largest frauds in American history, with billions of dollars stolen by thousands of people … In one instance, 29 states paid unemployment benefits to the same person. … Another individual got 10 loans for 10 nonexistent bathroom-renovation businesses, using the email address of a burrito shop.”
The good news is that home-grown cannabis “flower” production – this is not the stuff in the Craft Cannabis dispensaries, it’s all homebrew – is expected to reach 15.4 million pounds in the US by 2030. So the American “can do” spirit is alive and well, because by 2030 we should be growing enough weed just in our homes to give all those kids nearly a full pound of weed!
If you don’t have children, weed will help. If you do have children, weed will also help because, as the article notes,
“…only one in three home growers report being the only ones to consume what they grow; nearly half (49%) say that they share with friends or family,” stated Noah Tomares, NFD senior research analyst.”
So with a few billion dollars in stimulus, I’ll bet we can easily double the projection and everyone who feels left behind or pushed to the fringes of the world’s China-based economy can just sit back, toke up, and share some flower with their family members. It’s a WEED! Anyone can grow it, even when they’re totally stoned out of their minds!
Then they can vote by mail to avoid any problems associated with the next pandemic. In fact, I think we should allow Household Voting by Mail, where people just get a postcard with a single check box on it that applies to everyone in their household.
“The Future is Green”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/cannabis-cultivation-at-home-is-on-the-rise-here-s-what-a-new-report-says/ar-AA10QVaA
Addendum: I really believe Biden should highlight the spectacular growth in home-grown weed during his next State of the Union Address. There’s always so much boring stuff in there – world trade, foreign policy tensions and problems with countries people can’t find on a map, deficit spending so huge that almost nobody can perform the mental arithmetic to put in perspective, etc., etc. All these things that for most people seem to happen through “black boxes” that nobody can comprehend, run by people who might as well live on another planet…and do…
People’s eyes glaze over, their heads start to hurt, and they just tune out the State of the Union Address, for the most part.
But listen! If he just introduces himself as the President and starts talking about the great future America has in home-grown marijuana production and all the benefits it has, lights himself a joint has some cool-looking charts and graphs fly across the screen, people will be totally riveted.
He should do it. We’re approaching the Event Horizon and he is *definitely* the guy to help us cross over to the other side.
If we can double the projections, each one of those 16.6 million kids could have almost exactly 30 ounces of homegrown weed every year. And an ounce of good weed, the new, high-THC stuff, lasts a long time. You can get stoned in the morning and be totally bonged out all the way through school every single day for months at a time. If they run out, they can always walk down the street to the local dispensary and spend a little gubmint scratch to tide them over until the next flowers bloom.
I think that’s one big part of America’s future, and I daresay MSN and Bill Gates would agree.
There was one point in history when Bill Gates challenged the methods and practices of the teacher’s unions of the United States. As far as I can tell, the future is: More Marijuana Needed.
Randi Weingarten has, in my estimation at least, kicked his narrow little nerd ass and now we’re deliberately celebrating the growth of more stupidity and debilitation that lasts approximately a lifetime. Nothing has been achieved.
https://youtu.be/x5lZIGhShYg?t=446
Why do you hate old people? We couldn’t just let elderly boomers die.
Plus we don’t need children. We’ve outsourced procreation through immigration. Why spend 300k feeding and educating a kid when we can get sort of fed and educated volunteers for almost free?
SuperMike: I think the immigrant children are already being fully paid for by US taxpayers (housing, Medicaid, food via SNAP/EBT, Obamaphone, and the new broadband entitlement). See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/20/nyregion/nyc-migrants-texas.html for a quote about four taxpayer-funded migrant children:
“Imagine that we came all this way walking,” said Carolina Flores, 31, who fled Venezuela with her husband and four children and has settled with them at a shelter in Brooklyn. “Everything is very good, a hotel and house for free — that is something that would never happen in our country.”
Regarding the elderly boomers… they died at a higher rate in the U.S. than they did in no-lockdown Sweden! So we can’t say that our $5-10 trillion in spending saved net lives, In fact, by the way that we calculate COVID deaths, tallying without regard to life-years lost, the lockdowns will have killed at least half of the U.S. population. People will die at least somewhat sooner than previously expected due to (a) lockdown obesity, (b) lockdown drug and alcohol addiction, (c) lockdown shutdown of regular medical screening, (d) reduced amount of education, (e) reduced amount of earnings/wealth. (There is a well-established correlation between education and wealth and living longer.) This is not even counting all of the deaths that we caused in countries outside of the U.S. via our economic shutdown (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2020/03/28/if-all-lives-have-equal-value-why-does-bill-gates-support-shutting-down-the-u-s-economy/ ).