SCRIPT FOR VIDEO ABOVE
SCOTT OTT: I’m Scott Ott, and here’s a thought.
If we can cure poverty, why can’t we put a man on the moon…or land a probe on the surface of Mars?
After all, it’s my understanding, that in the last half-century or so, the U.S. federal government spent less than $900 billion to almost completely eradicate poverty.
Yet in those same 50 years despite spending $22 trillion — more than the cost of all U.S. wars combined — we still haven’t made a moon landing let alone probed the Martian soil.
The federal government was in charge of both of these efforts, so why are the outcomes so starkly different?
Today, cities like Detroit, Michigan offer a glorious tribute to the federal entitlement programs that have lifted the inner cities out of squalor, filled the nation’s universities with urban scholars, and virtually shuttered America’s prisons due to lack of criminals.
But the U.S. space program — during that same period of time, while spending that $22 trillion — has made virtually no measurable signs of progress.
By this time, America should have seen a dozen men walk on the moon, hundreds of astronauts in space, a floating space laboratory in earth orbit, resupplied by dozens of space — O, what do you call them? Let’s say “shuttles” coming in each year to dock with that space laboratory.
We should have been able to ring the planet with satellites, send an unmanned voyager beyond our solar system, or even lift a super-telescope up into orbit so we could look into deep space.
And yes, we should have launched a rocket to Mars and landed a probe right on the Martian surface.
But those kinds of accomplishments, I suppose, will have to remain in the realm of science fiction fantasy.
Meanwhile, the federal government has managed to virtually eliminate the category that used to be know as: “below the poverty level.”
Our once-gloomy and desolate inner-city neighborhoods now bloom with flowers, gleam from paint and elbow grease, bubble over with the joyful sound of children’s laughter, exult in artistic expression, and veritably hum to the music of free-market commerce.
Come one, Washington DC: if we can cure poverty, why can’t we put a man on the moon?
You know, our conquest of poverty happened so long ago now that some younger Americans don’t believe it ever happened.
They look around at all the prosperity and can’t imagine a time when it wasn’t so.
Even if you show them photographs of dingy cities, cluttered with garbage, dotted with prostitutes and drug dealers in housing unfit for human habitation, they think you staged those kinds of photos on some Hollywood backlot.
They simply can’t fathom a time when public officials lined their own pockets, and those of their union cronies, while streets buckled, pipes leaked, garbage drifted, high schools became abortion factories and drug bazaars, while rats and criminals squatted in condemned row homes.
“How could that ever happen in America?,” the kids say. “And if it had, how could the federal government ever put a stop to it?”
“After all, they can’t even put a man on the moon.”
Well, perhaps the federal government is good at doing some things, and not so good at doing others.
I’m Scott Ott, and…
[PAUSES, FINGERTIPS TO EAR] Wait a minute, I’m now being told that I may have reversed some of the numbers I mentioned earlier in the video.
[LISTENING] And…I “may have” “misstated” “some” of the “facts.”
But nevertheless, you get my point.
I’m Scott Ott, and there’s a thought.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member