You have a budget of $5 billion to spend on any ONE issue, be it health care, education, the war, stem cell research, the war on steroid use in baseball—anything. What needs it the most and why?
Daniela's take
I admit that when faced with this hypothetical scenario, I am at a real loss. It's actually much more entertaining to think about what the last eight years of neo-conservatism have insanely over-funded, rather than think about what needs the money. Here are a few of my favorites: the War on Terror, the War on Stoners, the War on Undocumented Immigrants, the War on Pre-Marital Sex, the War on People Who Carry Liquids Onto a Plane, and, of course: the Crusade for Bridges to Nowhere.
The under-funded issues camp gets rather unwieldy: Public schools, sex education, all manner of medical and scientific research, market regulation, green technology, and essentially everything else.
I have to pick one issue that is deserving of an additional $5 billion in funding? The task is, regrettably, impossible. And frankly, just weeks after we handed a $700 billion bailout to Wall Street, the task is dwarfed to the point of being unimportant, which is unfair because $5 billion is more money than I'll ever really comprehend.
I know, I know, I should just play nice with the game here. I should remind myself that $5 billion is just a hypothetical number in a hypothetical scenario. I should forget the fact that it's obvious that this lame-duck administration has raped every important issue in the country all the while as it served champagne to causes that haven't brought any tangible long-term benefit to society at large. The task at hand, after all, is to simply pinpoint an important issue that is deserving of more funding and attention.
Well, if I'm going to put aside the impracticality of the hypothetical situation, then let me add onto the impossibility of the scenario by suggesting that the $5 billion be spent on something that would never, unfortunately, happen in the United States of America. Let's throw that money at a tribunal that would actually try the Bush Administration for its crimes against humanity, its violations of the U.S. Constitution, and its general swindling of the electorate.
In my hypothetical scenario, the tribunal would try Rumsfeld, Cheney, Gonzales, Rice, and all the rest of the W. minions—and George himself, of course—and they would be convicted of the crimes they committed in the name of all Americans. If this impossible tribunal actually wasn't impossible, these convictions would result in no sentences. But the crimes would be acknowledged in the public arena, and the convicted would acknowledge their convictions publicly.
You may wonder what the value of this amnesty-granting tribunal would be. In college I was particularly focused on and fascinated with the concept of nation-building in a divided society where human rights and the rule of law have been violated on a grand-scale. My argument then and now is that the first step in the nation-building process in such a place is to develop that absent appreciation for the rule of law so that the ensuing democratization process (whether it's a renewal or birth thereof) can take place. Particularized amnesty, which is what I described above, is the linchpin in establishing a strong human rights culture and respect for the rule of law. This kind of amnesty does not forsake justice because the justice to be gained from it is of a restorative kind; retributive justice does not work in a post-conflict, divided society setting—particularly given the language of hope that, with the election of Obama, has re-framed the White House. This scenario would forgive (and yes, that would be hard) but not forget, providing for the happiest medium between general amnesty and Nuremberg-style justice. And it's certainly better than what's definitely going to happen: Doing nothing, holding no one accountable, sweeping everything under the rug.
Too bad it will never happen, just as I'll never have $5 billion to spend on any one issue.
Danish's take
After living through the massive bailouts on Wall Street, a number like "five billion" seems pretty small to me in terms of government spending. With that in mind, I take this week's prompt to mean "what's the most important 'low hanging fruit.'" Personally this is a no-brainer: end the War on Drugs. Besides, after all is said and done we'd probably wind up making a lot more than we would spend during the legalization and regulation process.
Our very own President-elect (and most probably his predecessor) has admitted to using "a little blow when [he] could afford it." We all know where this tragic tale leads: The Harvard Law Review, the U.S. Senate, and the Presidency. Clearly we need to make this stuff illegal (read: expensive) or else regular people will not be able to help themselves and will fall into equally drugged stupors. Seriously though, it's unlikely that many of you need to be informed of this but the War on Drugs has been a miserable failure. Drugs still exist, people still use them, criminals get rich off their illegal trade, and all of this begets incredible amounts of violence and wasted resources.
"What would legalization look like?" you might ask. Great question. When I say legalization, I don't mean "decriminalization." In my ideal world, there would be no "controlled substances." Drugs would be treated like food and alcohol, subject to certain safety standards and taxation, but that's it. Licensed sellers would replace violent gangsters and could sell their goods at the market dictated prices just like alcohol. Contrast this to the current state of affairs, wherein criminalization drives some users to criminal activities to afford the sky-high prices sellers are able to demand by virtue of a "risk premium." Additionally, addicts of more serious drugs would be able to find dependency assistance without fear of going to jail and public health would improve through the use of sanitary products and delivery methods (the demand for truly horrendous drugs like methamphetamine would disappear with superior, cheaper, and safter alternatives). Perhaps most importantly though, government expenditures for enforcement would be reduced (e.g. the millions we spend fighting coca farmers in Columbia) while we'd simultaneously experience an enormous increase in our tax revenue via the taxation of these goods -- anywhere from $10 billion to $14 billion a year nationally according to Jeffrey Miron, a visiting professor of economics at Harvard.
All of this does not even touch upon the tremendous environmental impact the illegal drug trade has on our country, the racist and classist ways in which our drug laws impact Americans, and the destruction these laws cause to families of non-violent offenders. Barack Obama has previously implied he would support the decriminalization or marijuana, which is an important first step that a majority of Americans support, but to truly create lasting change we need to go even further.
Jacob's take
Well, it’s only less than a percent of the amount we've put into "rescuing" the financial sector, so I'm sure that $5 billion is not enough for the task. So I may not be answering the question, but I think there is one major priority for government money right now, no matter how small the amount: A public works project to build a new infrastructure for green transportation.
Ironically, this is the perfect time for an auto industry crisis. We need a major effort to not modify but reorganize the transportation infrastructure in the US. In order to replace petroleum as the energy source for our cars, we need cars that don't use petroleum and gas stations that don't pump gas. The transformation has to be concerted: the infrastructure and the cars each need the other in order to exist.
Only government and not private enterprise—at least in the real world—can orchestrate something that requires this degree of coordination.
Of course, there’s this problem: Once you have the infrastructure, what do you plug it into? That is, we still need a green source for all that energy. I am actually not too concerned about this. I think creating the infrastructure is the primary priority, because once it exists it will create the competitive space for forthcoming solutions. Coming up with clever ways to move energy around is actually not very difficult. Creating a structural-economic framework in which technological development can be instantiated is the real, pressing challenge.
Jonah's take
Last week a team of scientists successfully grafted a windpipe fabricated from a woman’s own stem cells. This is big news if you have diabetes.
For years researchers have made promising strides in treating diabetes, and those in the field are constantly extolling the virtues of their studies, promising a cure within our lifetime. But being told a cure is around the corner is no solace for someone who is living daily with the disease. Though because of the progress made recently and advances in stem cell research lurking around the corner, I think our fantasy $5 billion will really be used well in this field. Some mandates can wait, others cannot.
Obama says he’ll reverse a bunch of the dumb-shit Bush laws. Thank god. Bush's veto of expanding stem cell research based on religious convictions is costing lives. Treating this disease now and in early stages in a person’s life is a good preventative measure, both for the spleen and for the economy. After all, managing and fighting this disease is costing Americans over $200 billion annually.
If you live in New York, you’ll find couched next to ‘benefits of sleep’ stories in the paper too often an "everyone is getting diabetes" story. In New York, one in eight adults have the disease and the rate of new cases is increasing. These are staggering numbers. If we threw some cash at this problem and lifted the ban on embryonic stem cell research, we could actually make a difference.
Huh. Now that I’ve spent my fantasy money, I feel sort of... sad. I miss it, I suppose. I feel like I want to throw it at a million other issues, but there are rules to this fantasy. No hard feelings, sustainable energy.
Nathan's take
If only all non-profits and donors cared first and foremost about the impact of their work and money. Unfortunately, they don't. Instead, considerations like legacy and prestige and power all influence decision-making. What results is a rush of money to the cause of the day, whether it's AIDS in Africa or micro-lending. New catastrophes as well as new solutions tend to receive vast attention and resources from donors, while persistent problems and tried-and-true approaches drift off the radar. When it comes to resource allocation, it seems the discount rate of many in the non-profit sphere is much higher than it ought to be, resulting in an emphasis on the near-term rather than the long.
I'm painting in broad strokes. But these tendencies do exist and they have real consequences, like spending on preventing and treating AIDS in Africa while access to water and nutrition improvement go underfunded. It is definitely a good thing that we don't need to spend vastly larger amounts of money on certain causes. But now that I have this $5 billion to spend, I need to consider where my dollars will have the greatest social return. As such, I'll be (anonymously) donating my $5 billion to prenatal and early childhood nutrition programs in developing countries.
What of that old proverb, "Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime?" The proverb makes intuitive sense and it tickles all of our moral pleasure centers—hard work's important, pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps, etc. But, depending on how hungry our aspiring fisherman is, he may find it very difficult to learn how to fish. Just like education early in life can create a stock of skills that generate higher returns over an entire lifetime, getting the sufficient caloric intake early in development helps to determine future health and lifetime capacity for learning and work. Well-fed pregnant mothers will give birth to healthy children who, if they get the nutrients they need, will have a greater capacity to take advantage of the opportunities that come their way—like learning how to fish. Just like profits reinvested by the firm will promote growth, calories invested by the body will increase a person’s productive capacity significantly.
Not only this, but even if our friend learns how to fish, he will need a fish or two to get him started. Without sufficient caloric intake, the body’s ability to sustain work is severely strained. Fixing this shortage can pay huge dividends. By one estimate made by Nobel prize winner Robert W. Fogel, 50% of the economic growth in Britain from 1800 through 1980 can be attributed to increases in the availability of calories, which both brought more people into the labor force and allowed those already in it to work more strenuously. And that is likely to be an underestimation, since it overlooks the interactions between nutrition and education I sketched. Such astounding results are hard to overlook.
Social innovation like micro-lending ought to be funded, and we should cheer for the good work done in much of Africa to contain the spread of AIDS. But I'll be giving my $5 billion to a cause that could pay dividends for decades—full bellies.
Ottavio's take
If I were Obama (yes, I added that to the question), I would use the money to publicly close Guantanamo Bay. I would try the people still held at Guantanamo Bay in U.S. courts and run the risk of releasing potential terrorists due to lack of evidence. I would offer compensation to those who are not proven guilty and consequently released. I would hold a public denunciation of torture and make an epic speech about the thin line between darkness and the light of civilization. I would even drop at least one heavy-handed Heart of Darkness reference. (For example: We must not "surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge" and let "the horror... the horror" of extremism push us away from the light into the dark corners of our humanity.)
Today's most pressing issues—the economic crisis, Islamic extremism, rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan, and global warming—are global issues. Not a single one of these issues can or should be solved unilaterally. To successfully tackle these problems, we need support. We need to make sure that when we make sacrifices, as we already have and will continue to do, their benefits are compounded. Guantanamo Bay gives credence, for good reason, to the view that the United States' only true objective is to get and keep power. Shutting it down and admitting our errors would go a long way to restoring our much-needed credibility.
Sarah's take
How much is $5 billion? If we're going to be throwing thousands of millions of (hypothetical) dollars around, let's pause to apprehend the scale. Is $5 billion dollars a lot, or very little? The laws governing such difficult-to-fathom sums are Einsteinian: their value is relative.
According to the Forbes list of billionaires, only 203 people in the world know the feeling of possessing $5 billion fortunes. The rest of us can just wonder. Viewed from this perspective, having $5 billion is like catching a rare glimpse of the phoenix. We're talking big money. Type five billion into a calculator and turn it upside down: ooooooooo’s. Indeed.
Jest aside, let's parse a few comparisons. In the universe of U.S. government spending, $5 billion is nothing compared to budget monsters like national defense ($607 billion in 2008) or Medicare ($396 billion). Lower on the priority list, international aid comes in at $14 billion. And down in the $5 billion range, we find the National Science Foundation budget and that of the Judiciary branch. Reason, it seems, is inexpensive.
The 2008 election, the most expensive in history, cost a total of $5.3 billion. Each year, Americans spend approximately $5 billion on Halloween accoutrements, according to the Halloween Consumer Intentions and Actions survey. Five billion remains to be spent of the total Hurricane Katrina aid package ($13.4 billion) -- a rare example in which $5 billion buys nothing at all.
So, is $5 billion a budget bonanza or piddling pocket change? What about at the international level -- what does a $5 billion nation look like? The annual GDP for Fiji, the idyllic honeymoon destination, is about $5 billion. But so is the annual GDP of another nation, also ringed by white sands and azure water, but somewhat less picturesque: Haiti. Five billion dollars is the value of the IMF loan to prop up Iceland's failing currency. Five billion dollars is what Charles Taylor smuggled out of Liberia. Five billion dollars is what one rogue trader cost French banking giant Société Générale.
Reader, let's be honest -- this meditation on the worth of $5 billion has hardly been fruitful. I'm scarcely any clearer on the matter than I was before. And yet I haven't even proposed a single use for our hypothetical vault full of cash. I suppose I'll leave that unresolved, pending an epiphany on the $5 billion, the $5 billion, the $5 billion...
Walter's take
We are better at identifying problems than solutions. Many—perhaps most—of the people I know share the Bono-Jeff-Sachs consensus that the best, most humanitarian way to spend a dollar is in foreign aid; they would privately admit to feeling guilt for all the other causes we fund—health care for Americans, the arts, NASA—when they contrast them with the importance of foreign aid. There is an excellent reason: The biggest human problem is obviously the enormous share of humanity (~2 billion people) that struggles to maintain its very existence. It's compelling. But we need to consider the price of solving the problem before we decide not to fund other worthy causes.
I'm not optimistic about foreign aid generally. Countries that benefit from it don't need it and countries that need it don't benefit from it. Theoretically, foreign aid donations are small even relative to the savings of those we aim to help (the economist Hernando de Soto estimates that all foreign aid given by all nations since WWII—including the Marshall Plan—amounts to 1/40th of the savings of the poorest billion people on earth). Even the very poor save—the problem is they don’t have an infrastructure to make use of their savings. In rural China, I had tea in the home of villagers in Jianxi Province. The home was full everywhere with bags of rice, which is how they saved their income. In Bogotá it was bricks, in India gold, and in East Africa they save in cattle (note: the word "capital" comes "cattle"). These are not productive investments—they reflect the bad access to capital markets, which is a reflection of developing societies’ weak institutions.
Two-hundred forty years ago Adam Smith proposed a startlingly simple recipe for economic development. As he put it, "Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things." He was right. We in the developed world are not so different from the individuals in the developing world. Most of them would do just fine among first-world institutions, especially after a generation. The difference is in our institutions—we have secure property rights, peace, and low taxes, which translate into opportunities for trade and investment and access to capital, which is everything any developing society needs. Last week I said I was grateful for our institutions.
I'm not saying there isn't work to do—this is the biggest problem in the world—but it needs a more radical solution than giving bags of beans to bureaucrats. Those radical solutions may be risky and intolerable to many.
So this is a plea for all the causes that my friends privately resent: Health care and education for comparatively wealthy people, the arts, science. One can argue that these also are attempts to solve problems that won't be solved by throwing money at them. This is wrong: The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a problem that won't be solved by throwing money at it. The Oakland Unified School District? Let’s throw the money that way and not look back.
Will's take
While $5 billion dollars could be spent well on any number of policy priorities in Obama's first term, I think that an investment in science and technology, specifically focusing on energy efficiency and innovation around alternative energy, would provide the most concentrated set of benefits, as well as spill-over effects in a variety of other areas. I agree with Barack Obama that we need a new Space Race, in which the enormous economic and educational power spent by previous generations of American leaders on competing with the Soviets is channeled into solving the twin problems of fossil fuel depletion and global warming. I would like to emphasize, though, the importance of competition and innovation (free market ideas put towards progress in addition to profit) in making sure this money is well spent.
More specifically, an increase in scholarship money for the sciences is needed, especially for lower-income children. An investment in technological entrepreneurship is a way to ensure future job growth; by tying awards to both performance and need, in much that same way that wealthy private universities pay full tuition for qualified lower-income applicants, the brunt of this job creation will be in the neediest sectors. This would leave existing federal financial aid in place, but supplement it to provide opportunity for economically-disadvantaged students to enroll in elite science and technology schools. In 21st-century America, there should never be a "ghetto Einstein," unable to get the support and training he or she needs due to inadequate education funding.
A similarly entrepreneurial approach, on a grander scale, would be creating a series of government-funded "prizes" for various modeled after the Ansari X-Prize for private spacecraft development. This has already been started; House legislation creating the hydrogen fuel cell "H Prizes" has been signed into law, though it has yet to be awarded. Here, instead of subsidizing underperforming technology (a common criticism of many green jobs schemes), the government can step in and raise aspirations beyond what's conceivable today. Such a scheme could not only reward excellence and create jobs, it could lead to whole new industries opening up.
Luckily, while making no specific mention of the prize idea in their agendas on change.gov in energy and technology policy, the Obama administration already seems to be taking these sorts of initiatives seriously, and many other common sense policy proposals in this field (weatherizing houses, subsidizing energy-efficient appliances, etc.). Besides the prize idea, these are all ideas widely held as beneficial in his circle of advisors. Let's just hope that in working to create "Green Jobs," the administration focuses on rewarding excellence and innovation, and less on political sops like corn ethanol and "clean coal," or broad subsidies that use taxpayer money to increase market inefficiencies.
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