29 May 2020

Post-Satiric Satire About How Life Cost Money

I was about to write about how we spend $200 billion a year on law enforcement because of crime (we have 15,000 homicides a year) and then the officers we hire to keep the peace shoot 1,000 more people a year. We spend big money to save lives and instead they add to the killing. We could save money and lives by laying off everyone in law enforcement.

Even better, think of all the money we could save if we spent 0% of GDP on healthcare instead of 17%. (I could go on with the cost savings we'd have if only we cut out all these fancy new costs we've incurred since the Dark Ages. Life expectancy then might have been only 30 years but you could get by on about $200 a year.)

Let me point out that if you think it is absurd that we would accept 1,000 homicides a month because it is too expensive to save lives, note that we simply accept 1,000 COVID deaths a DAY because it is too expensive to save those lives through methods like aggressive test and trace.

Then I remembered that when you have a deranged president beloved by 33% of the population there is no such thing as using satire to make a point and that every stupid proposal just sounds like another proposal. Rather than become an argument to save more lives by spending more money on making our world safer, this point would be seen as a sincere argument to make the world less expensive because, after all, the point has never been about making life longer but instead simply making it cheaper.

Put more succinctly?  
Life cost money.
All in all, though, it's a price worth paying.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.


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