>
>Very true. But where do you think all those billions of dollars get spent?
>Some, at least, go to salaries -- keeping people employed -- (including
>the janitors who clean the buildings and the truckers who bring in the
>raw materials). Those salaries generally go to food and clothing and
>education for the children, etc. Certainly, big business keeps a lot of
>the money (which should go in part to the stockholders, many of whom are
>NOT the few enormously wealthy); but none of it leaves the earth.
>
>When the space program got gutted, years ago, lots of highly trained
>engineers were looking for jobs and their families were in trouble.
>(I worked in a second-hand bread shop. These men were begging for jobs
>as driver-salesmen on bread routes; their wives were shopping with
>food stamps.) Yes, the better their training, the sooner they did get
>appropriate jobs; but still, they were taking jobs that less-well
>trained people could (should?) have had.
>
>If some money were spent on proper treatment facilities for the
>mentally ill (which covers quite a few of those homeless on the
>streets, honestly -- thank Ronald Reagan), and more spent on making
>real job opportunities available to many teens who can't see any
>good future, I would be first to applaud. But cutting the space
>program won't do it. That money won't go to 'public welfare' (which
>largely hits anything that hurts the prosperous, rather than the
>kind of grass-roots stuff that really helps the people who need it).
>
>I'm for funding programs started by the people who live in the
>middle of the crisis and know what's going on. It doesn't take a
>great deal of money (on a government scale, that is -- a few
>millions here and there) if the money gets to the people who
>run the show rather than to a bureaucracy.
>
>Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now. Sorry about that.
>
>Martha Bartter
>Truman State University
Martha,
No need to apologize. Once in a while, a person says stuff others
are thinking but don't know how to express adequately for lack of
information. You've done just that, so thanks.
-Sean
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:26 PDT