Thursday, October 05, 2006

In answer to the question...


'What are we doing to maintain this (economic) disparity (between the poor and the rest of us)', there's this story this week out of (where else) the United States of America. We are going to spend U.S.$1.2 billion to build a fence between the United States and Mexico. That's almost half the U.S.$3 billion we need to control malaria worldwide for one year, that is,to prevent half of 2.7 million deaths and 2 billion infections ((3/1.2)*2.7 million = 1.08 million) mostly in children under 5 years of age in Africa

In other words we've made the following choice for our U.S.$1.2 Billion:

1. Prevent 750,000 children under 5 from dying
2. Build a fence to help maintain our lofty economic status in the world.


(consider this my uplifting thought for the day)
(for a more even mix of actual uplifting and depressing news, see the executive summary of the 2006 state of the future report

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I can't believe they're building a fence. It seems such an archaic response to the 'problem'. I am heartened to read of Mexico's battle against the proposals.

Anonymous said...

The fuck with illegal mexicans trying to cross the border, we should shoot them all that try to get into the U.S. illegally. Build a huge electrical fence! Many illegal immigrants consume a high amount of government resources without paying a corresponding high rate of taxes. This is America people, only people with documents are allowed!!!

Benjamin Ady said...

anonymous

can't quite tell whether your being sarcastic/ironic. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt =) In the future, using "k" when spelling Amerika would give us a bit of a hint =)

Unknown said...

FUCK all the people who are against immigrants