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One Bush Left Behind
By Greg Palast
30/01/08 "ICH"
-- - -Here’s your question, class:
In his State of the Union, the President
asked Congress for $300 million for poor kids in the inner city.
As there are, officially, 15 million children in America living
in poverty, how much is that per child? Correct! $20.
Here’s your second question. The President
also demanded that Congress extend his tax cuts. The cost: $4.3
trillion over ten years. The big recipients are millionaires.
And the number of millionaires happens, not coincidentally, to
equal the number of poor kids, roughly 15 million of them. OK
class: what is the cost of the tax cut per millionaire? That’s
right, Richie, $287,000 apiece.
Mr. Bush said,
“In neighborhoods across our
country, there are boys and girls with dreams. And a decent
education is their only hope of achieving them.”
So how much educational dreaming will $20
buy?
-George Bush’s
alma mater, Phillips
Andover Academy, tells us their annual tuition is $37,200. The
$20 “Pell Grant for Kids,” as the White House calls it, will buy
a poor kid about 35 minutes of this educational dream. So
they’ll have to wake up quickly.
-$20 won’t cover the cost of the final
book in the Harry Potter series.
If you can’t buy a book nor pay tuition
with a sawbuck, what exactly can a poor kid buy with $20 in
urban America? The Palast Investigative Team donned baseball
caps and big pants and discovered we could obtain what local
citizens call a “rock” of crack cocaine. For $20, we were
guaranteed we could fulfill any kid’s dream for at least 15
minutes.
Now we could see the incontrovertible
logic in what appeared to be quixotic ravings by the President
about free trade with Colombia, Pell Grant for Kids and the
surge in Iraq. In Iraq, General Petraeus tells us we must
continue to feed in troops for another ten years. There is no
way the military can recruit these freedom fighters unless our
lower income youth are high, hooked and desperate. Don’t say,
‘crack vials,’ they’re, ‘Democracy Rocks’!
The plan would have been clearer if Mr.
Bush had kept in his speech the line from his original draft
which read, “I have ordered 30,000 additional troops to Iraq
this year – and I am proud to say my military-age kids are not
among them.”
Of course, there’s an effective
alternative to Mr. Bush’s plan – which won’t cost a penny more.
Simply turn it upside down. Let’s give each millionaire in
America a $20 bill, and every poor child $287,000.
And, there’s an added benefit to this
alternative. Had we turned Mr. Bush and his plan upside down, he
could have spoken to Congress from his heart.
-For more on Bush and education read
"No Child's Behind Left" in Armed Madhouse excerpted
here.
-Also read Palast's take on the 2007 State of the Union
here.
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