Campaign Promise

This is where the rubber meets the road.

Total cost:18 trillion, 564 billion, 500 million

These are the budgetary numbers that Bernie Sanders put up and the numbers I feel comfortable putting forward as a campaign promise. I would work for these things regardless of the challenges put up by my opposition and this post is to clarify why we need to spend money on things our country needs to remove the crushing weight that the oligarchs are putting on individuals, especially children, elders, differently-abled people and women simply to placate the hunger for cash that the aristocracy deems necessary to keep them in the manner to which they have become accustomed. I am here to say that even their lives would be enhanced by spending this sort of money and the numbers below prove that out. The old saying that you have to spend money to make money holds true, even for government. The biggest hole in these figures is child care, which I estimate would add another 850 billion. The difficulty with pinning down this number is that there are different numbers, depending on who is reporting them about the numbers of mothers and the numbers of children in our country. The best way to understand the people who are most hurt by our current system is to find out who is not worthy of counting. The people who have fallen through the cracks are hardest to count and hundreds of thousands of homeless children, mothers and families are living under the radar as we read/write this.

Now, let us consider the benefits...

Avoided costs (benefits) 36 trillion, 854 billion

It does not take a genius to understand that for those folks who are having a difficult time making it, these expenditures make very little sense because the numbers seem so huge. If it helps, think of it this way. Every billion can be seen as about three dollars for every man, woman and child in America.  We the People are about 333.33 million one third of a billion, so if we each pitched in three dollars, it would make a billion. The fact is that the savings outweigh the costs two to one. When we speak of government, many people ask, "Where does all the money go?" Well, if you really look into the numbers, there is a massive portion that goes to warfare and a substantial part pays interest on outstanding loans that we collectively take out to pay for services and infrastructure that was provided in the past. It makes no sense, but spending in the present often avoids costs. For instance, the prenatal care that women receive before their children are born repays about three to one during the first few years in the life of the child. better outcomes during the birth process and healthier babies save money when compared to sickly children that do not thrive. similarly, the money spent on education and health care provide long term benefits such as security and better health over the course of the lives of those who receive them. Instead of not educating a child, but having to send them to prison for doing something stupid and senseless saves about 60K per year for their incarceration...likewise, preventing minor diseases and getting early preventative care can save hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient, so let's talk more about these numbers.

I know that math is something many people hate and the numbers we are talking about are huge, but when we divided them by the population and look at the savings over time, this approach to transforming society may be the best way to head off total collapse at the hands of the greedy super-rich. The costs of these policies, if spread evenly among the population, would be about 56K per person. The benefits would be more than double the costs. The only reason that the uberwealthy do not want this to happen is that it would temporarily inconvenience them and it would liberate such a large segment of society that they would lose some of their wage slaves. Perhaps the greatest benefit would be non-monetary because the millions of Americans who are now wage slaves would have some breathing room instead of having to forego vacations, borrow to put their children through school and risk bankruptcy if their health fails. all of these benefits would cut into the obscene profitability of banks, insurance and financial sectors.

these are not the folks i am running for congress to represent. I am running for people like myself who have borne the brunt of the recession, been functionally underemployed for the better part of a decade and those who will come up in the future. We need stability and we need it now. Not stability for the ultra-wealthy, but for the average person, the 99.9%. I am committed to these changes in a way that our "opponents"/oppressors, cannot fathom. I am a stand against institutionalized racism, sexism, classism, ageism, bigotry and hatred. to become a strong nation again we need to call out these and other crippling social ills at every opportunity. not jus tto make people aware of the damage being done to individuals and families by continuing the current system, but to work toward a better state of affairs for all.

What I am working for is not just to benefit the people here in northeast Wisconsin, but the nation as a whole. The future generations will ask us, "When we faced those issues, what did you do to help?" I refuse to have to say, "Nothing."