I AM A JEW (PART X - The Abject Poverty of the Palestinians)

As the title shows this is the 10th part (actually the 11^th, if you count the Special Bulletin) of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts I urge you to do so. They are, after all a continuum. Easy access to the others can be obtained by clicking on the titles: "I AM A JEW (Part I)," "I AM A JEW (Part II)," "I AM A JEW (Part III)," "I AM A JEW (Special Bulletin)," "I AM A JEW (Part IV - The Torah & The Talmud)," "I AM A JEW (Part V - Gaza Is A Huge Prison)," "I AM A JEW (PART VI - The Palestinians)," "I AM A JEW (PART VII - A Defense of Israel’s Policies and a Rebuttal)", "I AM A JEW (PART VIII - Hamas & Likud)" and "I AM A JEW (PART IX- The Palestinian Diaspora & The Right of Return)."

I am forever struck by how American Jewish liberals are at the forefront of the fight against poverty in the United States. They are at the forefront in fighting for the right of minorities from discrimination, be they African-Americans or Hispanics, and yet they seem to be tone deaf to the plight of the Palestinians, the discrimination practiced against them, their permanent status as refugees without permanent homes, rights of citizenship, and dire poverty.

Right now the focus is on Gaza, for a temporary end to hostilities there has brought about once again an International effort to raise money to rebuild that which Israeli bombs, shells, and other explosives destroyed. We keep hearing the same old mantra, that all that Israel did was defend itself, but in fact it was the Gazans, (and it matters not at all, whether we call them Gazans or Palestinians) who erupted after years of blockade, entry and exit permits, and once again the mass arrest and incarceration of many of its members, in response to the murder of three Israelis.  Israel has far from abandoned its policy of collective punishment.

What is the arrest and incarceration of 500, without trial because they belong to an organization some of whose members committed a heinous crime, except collective punishment?

Some rockets are lobbed at Israel in bitter retaliation and the whole of the Gaza population is punished, thousands killed, many more wounded, old men, young men trying to support their families, women, children. Israel tell us they were just collateral damage and Hamas is to blame - they put them in harm's way. But where were they to go? Israel propaganda, which is too often echoed by the American apologists for Israel, tell us they dropped warning leaflets. What a joke! Rockets were falling everywhere and leaflets told them to go somewhere else when bombs where dropping everywhere. Children killed on the beach. Were there bombs hidden under the sand?

Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas of the world. See this Washington Post article. According to Info Please it is the fifth-densest population area in the world, but, of course, in the others the people are not trying to escape bombardment.

According to the BBC this is what Gaza looks like:

The BBC reports “International donors have pledged $5.4bn (£3.4bn) for the Palestinians at a conference in Cairo.”

Will that bring back the thousands of lives lost? Will that end the poverty?

Here is another photo from the BBC:

It’s all rubble. And how long before another incident, or plain desperation will start the cycle all over again?

Does anybody have any idea what kind of suffering has been imposed on the Palestinians? What kind of abject poverty they have been reduced to? Here is an article in Haaretz, or try here.

Allow me to quote from its beginning:

Life has never seemed so grim for the Mustafas, a family of seven cramped into a shabby two-room hovel in Gaza's Jabalya refugee camp.

 Seven years into an Israeli blockade and ten months into a crippling Egyptian one, Gaza's economic growth has evaporated and unemployment soared to almost 40 percent by the end of 2013.

Opposition to the Hamas militant group which runs the Gaza Strip has led its neighbors to quarantine the enclave, shutting residents out of the struggling Mideast peace process and leaving them with plenty of parties to blame.

 Living on U.N. handouts of rice, flour, canned meat and sunflower oil, with limited access to proper health care or clean water, families like the Mustafas - seemingly permanent refugees from ancestral lands now part of Israel - have no money, no jobs and no hope.

 "We're drowning... We feel like the whole world is on top of us. I turn on the television and I see the lifestyles on there, and I think, God help me leave this place," said Tareq, 22.

The Mustafas often must pick up and move when rain floods their low-lying home - even on a sunny day, it's lined with slick, smelly mildew. They stand in the dark, as 12-hour power cuts are now the norm throughout Gaza due to scant fuel.

 "There's no money for university or to get married. There's not even enough to spend outside the house so we can escape a little. What kind of life is this?" Tareq asks.

Well over half of Gaza residents receive food from the United Nations, and the number is on the rise.

What about the West Bank?

Reuters reported in September of 2012:

(Israeli) restrictions on movement, faltering aid flows, a paralyzed private sector and a chronic fiscal crisis cloud the horizons," UNCTAD declared. Amid persistent high unemployment, it added, "one in two Palestinians is classified as poor."

 The report, for an UNCTAD meeting in Geneva later this month, said the impact of the Israeli occupation since 1968 on the productive base of the Palestinian economy, and especially its once-flourishing agriculture, "has been devastating."

 The economy has lost access to 40 per cent of West Bank land, 82 percent of its ground water, and more than two thirds of its grazing land.

A Beirut Lebanon newspaper reports: 

BEIRUT (Ma'an) -- Around 160,000 Palestinians are living below the poverty line in refugee camps in Lebanon, the ambassador to Beirut says.

 Nearly 13,000 Palestinian refugees are living in extreme poverty in Lebanon, Ashraf Dabour told Ma'an.

 Palestinian refugees are banned from entering 75 professions in Lebanon. "Practicing any of these careers is considered a breach of Lebanese law," Dabour said.

 The Lebanese parliament amended a law restricting Palestinian refugees' access to work. "However, the Lebanese cabinet has not put that amendment into effect," the Palestinian ambassador said.

 "We hear sweet talk from Lebanese officials about the Palestinian refugees' right to work and live in dignity, but in reality nothing is translated into action."

I could go on country by country, because the story is the same everywhere.

But what about in Israel proper?

From The New Yorker of June 4, 2013

… in May, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a report showing that, of the world’s thirty-four economically developed countries, Israel is the most impoverished. With a poverty rate of twenty-one per cent, Israel has a higher percentage of poor people than Mexico, Turkey, or debt-ridden Spain and Greece. The report’s findings made front-page headlines in Israel, and officials there scrambled to sound both indignant and unconcerned. They had some explaining to do: How does a nation with double the average growth rate of other countries in the developed world have a fifth of its population living in poverty?

 … twenty-eight percent of Arab Israeli(s) (are) children receiving an education that is below that of many third-world countries, …

And finally from the British newspaper The Guardian:

Aid alone won't help the desperate Palestinians A UN reports links all of the Palestinian economy's dire problems to the Israeli occupation and associated constraints. Aid from the EU and others is merely a sop for political failure.

And referring to a report released by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad) the paper goes on to say:

A quick look at the report's section headings gives an immediate picture of how desperate the situation is: aid-driven, jobless economic growth, with an eroded productive base; erosion of manufacturing capacity; broad economic divergence between Gaza and the West Bank; high levels of poverty and food insecurity; high and persistent unemployment undermines the quality of human capital; separation barrier deepens isolation from global markets; heavy dependence on trade with Israel, and a worsening trade deficit; fiscal vulnerability remains high, despite austerity measures; withholding [Palestinian Authority] customs clearance revenue aggravates fiscal instability; indirect imports from Israel and lost Palestinian revenue.

 An idea of the desperation facing the Palestinians is given by a 2010 survey conducted by the World Food Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, which says: "Palestinian people have used various strategies to cope with poverty and food insecurity under prolonged Israeli occupation. These strategies have included – in addition to borrowing – receiving food support from family and friends, restricting food to adults in order to feed children, reducing health and education spending, running down savings, and selling off jewellery, furniture and productive assets. The top three coping strategies used are deferring payment of utility bills, lowering the quality and quantity of food intake, and borrowing."

 The litany of problems appears endless. While it is tempting to reel off the plethora of depressing statistics provided in this report, it is perhaps better to reflect on the salient theme – Israel and the occupation. No attempt is made to describe the problems facing the Palestinian economy without reference to the continued occupation and associated constraints.

 Unemployment (at 30%, and 43% for under-30s), manufacturing and agricultural decline (despite a recent upturn), large-scale revenue losses, "dire" humanitarian conditions, worsening socioeconomic indicators – all these issues and more are linked explicitly and repeatedly to the political situation.

How much longer will the liberal American Jewish community make excuses and defend the indefensible? Where is Christian charity?

I ask no more of my Jewish and Christian brethren but that they live by the words of the Bible, Isaiah 49:6. and to demand that Israel be a “light unto the nations” instead of one that leads us into darkness.

I welcome comments, but will not publish any, unless they have a unique relevance to the segment under discussion, until this series is complete.

The Real Battles Are Between Elections

I find it amazing how much the media, and as a result, the general public, focuses on the Presidential elections to the detriment of other events, and how much issues are defined between elections, as well as by the outcomes of so-called off year elections to the Congress, and in state elections.

We have just had a Presidential election and speculation has already started as to who the candidates for President might be four years hence.

Yet what was noteworthy in the just-concluded Presidential election was the extent to which issues were defined before the campaign started. I don’t want to attempt here to catalogue the issues that were, or were not discussed, but to illustrate the point by mentioning some.

We had three debates between the major candidates, yet neither Global Warming (possibly better called Climate Change) nor the carnage of our youth in our inner cities ever came up.

Climate Change did come to the fore toward the end of the campaign because of the devastation of storm Sandy, and guns came to the public’s consciousness and entered the political lexicon after the election as a result of the wanton killing of 20 children (and seven adults) in a suburban town in Connecticut, but even now the atmosphere that has been created by the very profitable and free-spending gun manufacturers, makes it incumbent for our President and others to proclaim their adherence to, and support of, the second Amendment, and for our President to show how he too loves guns by publishing a photo showing him with a gun.

But what of the second amendment? As recently as 1939 the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision held that restrictions on the possession of certain types of shotguns did not violate the Constitution because it has no “reasonable relationship to any preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia”.

So how did we get from there to here? It was not as a result of any election, or the debate or discussion during any election. It was through large expenditures in propaganda by the gun manufacturers, who after taking over the NRA, which used to be a non-political sporting association, used it as a front to propagandize the issue and eventually to intimidate law makers by huge expenditures in opposition to those who did not adhere to their agenda. But this was done over many years, in between elections, and in by-elections, until a bare majority of the Supreme Court  (the usual 5 to 4) in the Heller case accepted the position of the gun manufacturers.

At the same time, the media, as is their wont, misrepresented the views of the public by giving the impression that most Americans were rushing out to buy guns, when, in fact, a small minority were buying many guns, or as Reuters reported: 

“Even as gun purchases rise, the share of U.S. households with a gun has been falling for decades, from 54 percent in 1977 to 32 percent in 2010, according to the University of Chicago's General Social Survey.”

But what else has been going on between elections? One of the things I noticed between elections was that whenever a discussion of increasing inheritance taxes came up, the radio station to which I frequently listened, had a huge up-tick in ads offering counseling for estate planning, which most listeners would not have needed since few had enough assets to be effected by such increases, but which gave the impression that most were likely to be effected. The ads intended to seem non-political, in fact seemed clearly to have that purpose.

And what about the slogans that are so carefully crafted and repeated over and over between elections?

We don’t tax too little; We spend too much.

We want the economy, not the government to grow.

Generational Theft (What greater generational theft can there be then to leave future generations a world of hurricanes, typhoons, rising water levels, forest fires, and tsunamis, or a lack in education, or in infrastructure?)

We are Pro-Life! (Who wouldn’t be) and how does that match up against being “Pro Choice”.

Support the troops!

Cut and run!

Tax and Spend!

These aren’t just slogans during an election. They are repeated over and over again between elections, and they determine how issues are defined and discussed during elections.

In the Presidential “debates” there is an effort to avoid any real discussion. Here is how the Commission on Presidential Debates said the 2012 Presidential debates would be moderated:

“The first debate will focus on domestic policy…The moderator will ask a question, and each candidate will have 2 minutes to respond.”

 “The second presidential debate will be a town-hall style meeting. Voters will be allowed to ask questions directly of each candidate…Each candidate will have 2 minutes to respond.”

 “The format for the third presidential debate will be identical to that of the first presidential debate.”

It should be noted that the candidates cannot even decide on the topics they want to address, and does anybody really think that an enlightening answer can be given in two minutes. Is it any wonder that we have the focus on who scowled, who invaded the others space, or who looked at his watch.

And then the media lauds the small state caucuses that are so important in deciding who gets nominated. Not only does this mean that a small percentage of a small population, has an outsize voice, but these people, according to the media, don’t decide whom to vote for until they have shook their hands. Boy, that really tells us what the candidate stands for!!! Or as the website for New Hampshire lauds its state: “Shake hands with as many Presidential Candidates as possible.”

And then there is the argument that the best government is the one closest to the people. That is supposed to mean that the state government is better than the Federal, the town or village government is better than the state, etc. But what it really means is that the smaller the jurisdiction the fewer people vote, the less information on the candidates and the issues is available, and very few even know who represents them. But that according to these avatars of the Right that is what is best for us. Government closest to the people indeed!!

But the fact is that while we are celebrating the re-election of Obama we have already forgotten the shellacking Democrats took only two years ago. To be sure gerrymandering played a role in the fact that even though Democrats won one million more votes than Republicans in the total votes for House seats, an even greater factor was the turnout was far, far smaller in the “off year election” than in the Presidential one, and there is the rub. Unless we can get people to turn out in the off year elections and in the State governors elections and in the state legislative elections, getting the turnout in the Presidential election will never, never be enough.

Finally, we need run off elections. No country in Europe, or in most of the world, would let a candidates win by less than a majority. It is doubtful that Senator Marco Rubio, who is being touted as the Republican savior, (God only knows why) would have won his seat if there had been a run-off. He won with 49% of the vote, with former Gov. Charlie Crist garnering 30% and Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek polling 20%. It is highly likely that if there had been a runoff that Meek’s vote would have gone to Crist, and Rubio, who was rated by the Koch Brothers-financed group Americans For Prosperity as the “only perfect senator,” would have lost.

Comments, questions, or corrections, are welcome and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified.

The Fiscal Cliff

In my last post entitled "We Interrupt this Debate for Some Timely Comments.” I commended to the reader an article entitled “President Obama: The Democrats' Ronald Reagan” but introduced my subject with: “As the impending fiscal cliff moves ever closer, some timely observations appear to be in order and they will follow soon.” and that will be the main subject of this commentary.

In the meantime, however, the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut cannot be ignored or as Ernst Hauser of the Bronx and Manhattan, NY said:

Yesterday’s events have interrupted the interruption - since the Supreme Court has chosen to break the SECOND AMENDMENT into 2 pieces, separating the "well regulated militia" and the "right to bear arms" the time has come to REPEAL it and replace it with a clearer worded one, that neither the CJ nor Scalia could twist. In the meantime Congress could repass the Brady bill, without an expiration date or time.

So much has been said on this subject that I have not much to add, except to observe that the tragedy in Newport, Connecticut is dwarfed by the carnage that goes on every day throughout the US without much publicity. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence reports that more than 30,000 people are killed by guns in this nation each year. Yet this daily tragedy, neither commands the attention of the media, nor the attention of the nation.

Is this because multiple deaths occurring at the same time and place make for better headlines than smaller numbers occurring simultaneously, but in different places?

Or is it because such a large percentage of the victims of gun violence are black?

The first possibility is bad. The second is outrageous. 

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention of the Department of Justice reports: “Young African-American males have the most elevated homicide victimization rate of any race or gender group. Homicides involving firearms have been the leading cause of death for African-American males ages 15 to 19 since 1969.”

Whatever the reason, the lack of attention to this ongoing carnage by the media is a disgrace.

Now to the Fiscal Cliff!

I find myself disturbed here not only by the distortions on the Right, but by the blasé attitude toward the Cliff on the part of the Left. Thus I have started to get e-mails from an organization styling itself as AmericasDemocrats.org, which refers to that looming calamity as “the so-called fiscal cliff -- and why going over it might not be so bad.” Some suggest that it would take a long time for its effects to be felt. And the rest of the Left blogosphere, while not going quite this far, proclaims the slogan: “No Deal is better than a Bad deal.” While I have no difficulty agreeing with this in principle, I find that these self-styled “Liberals” define a “Bad Deal” as anything that makes the slightest change in the Entitlement programs.

Yes, it might be necessary for the President to allow the country to go over the Cliff rather than to give in to the constant blackmail by those who have decided that they can get their way by taking the Nation hostage, but the failure on the part of the Left to recognize the seriousness of this step, or to downplay it, is deeply disturbing, to say the least.

Let us understand what it means!

I quote from pages one and two of a 10 page paper released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the highly respected non-partisan arm of Congress, entitled: “Economic Effects of Reducing the Fiscal Restraint That Is Scheduled to Occur in 2013.” 

“Under current law, the federal budget deficit will fall dramatically between 2012 and 2013 owing to scheduled increases in taxes and, to a lesser extent, scheduled reductions in spending—a development that some observers have referred to as a ‘fiscal cliff.’ … The resulting weakening of the economy will lower taxable incomes and raise unemployment…” (Emphasis added) 

“If measured for calendar years 2012 and 2013, the amount of fiscal restraint is even larger. Most of the policy changes that reduce the deficit are scheduled to take effect at the beginning of calendar year 2013, so budget figures for fiscal year 2013—which begins in October 2012—reflect only about three-quarters of the effects of those policies on an annual basis. 

“CBO expects—with the economy projected to contract at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the first half of the year and expand at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in the second half. Given the pattern of past recessions as identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research, such a contraction in output in the first half of 2013 would probably be judged to be a recession.“ (Emphasis added)

Furthermore, Christine Lagarde has urged US leaders to reach a deal to avoid the "fiscal cliff,” warning that the uncertainty was damaging the global economy. The head of the International Monetary Fund told the BBC's Katty Kay that the US had a duty "to try to remove uncertainty and doubt as quickly as possible.” 

Even as early as December 12, 2012 Reuters reported that Dupont was already curtailing spending due to the imminence of the fiscal cliff. 

Furthermore, failure to reach agreement and falling over the cliff means that unemployment insurance checks stop being paid as of Dec. 29 resulting in “about 2.1 million Americans loos(ing) their extended jobless benefits … (and) An additional 930,000 people will run out of unemployment insurance in early 2013. 

Anyone reading this analysis can see the consequences are real and they are serious. Going over the cliff cannot be approached lightly, and from a political standpoint, if it must be endured, it must be clear to the American people that there was no real choice.

This is the President’s dilemma. He cannot stonewall, as the Left would have him do! He cannot cave to their laments, “No changes to Social Security, to Medicare, to Medicaid.” He must be, and he must appear to be, reasonable. It must be crystal clear that if this calamity were to happen that it was Republican intransigence that was to blame.

The Left keeps screaming: “We need more jobs” and it ignores that falling off the cliff will increase unemployment and increase the hardship of the unemployed.

Furthermore these strident voices ignore that more is at stake than entitlements.

Eduardo Porter writing in the New York Times of December 19, 2012, points out that “loath to raise taxes on the middle class yet unwilling to cut deeply into the budgets for Social Security or Medicare, the president and his advisers proposed cutting the discretionary part of the budget devoted to everything except defense and other security agencies to 1.7 percent of economic output by 2022, down from 3.1 percent last year” but there is not a word about such cuts from the Left. For the Left it appears that nothing matters other than entitlements.

But there is much at stake here!! Possibly more than even entitlements. To quote from the article: “It pays subsidies for higher education and housing assistance for the poor. It finances the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It pays for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and training programs for unemployed workers.” But even Porter leaves out much of what is in that part of the budget. How about National Parks? How about the budget for the SEC and our other regulatory agencies? How about the budget of the IRS, where for every cut in its enforcement budget, we lose a multiple in tax revenues. I could go on and on. What about spending on infrastructure? See here. But I don’t hear any concern from the Left.

I know that we live in an age of slogans, and the pretense of simple solutions, in an age of short columns and short attention spans, but unless we focus on what is truly at stake and how difficult the choices are, we undermine the very things we value. Entitlements are very important, but they are not the be all and the end all.

And then comes the final straw from this new messenger from the Left. This AmericasDemocrats.org gives the impression that it is connected to the Democratic Party. Not only is this not true, but it gives us this bit of revisionist history. It tells us:

Did you know that Democratic “bosses” made FDR accept Harry Truman as vice president?

Did you know that Truman was “very anti-Semitic and racist”?

Did you know that Japan did not surrender primarily because of the atom bomb?

The first is not true. No one could make Roosevelt do anything he did not want to do and he demonstrated this four years before when he wanted Henry Wallace on his ticket, by being prepared to threaten not to run if Wallace was not his running mate.

As for the second, it was Truman who signed an executive order integrating the military at a time when most still thought of African-Americans as inferior, and it was Truman who against the strong opposition of his Secretary of State, George Marshall, recognized the State of Israel.

The website sets forth a view of the Cold War that can only be described as being out of playbook of the then communist party, blaming the cold war on Truman and American Imperialism. For more on Wallace, see here and particularly the sections on “The 1948 Presidential election” and “Later career”.

Next time I will return to the discussions with my readers, which I left off on December 4, 2012 with The President’s Re-election (More Discussion III)

What can we, and should we do about the deficit?

Where can we and should we cut?

I last addressed this in my post of October 28th under the title: "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part VI)," which I urge you to re-read.

In that posting, I address the insincerity of Republicans claims of concern with the deficit, while every one of their proposed budgets would vastly increase the deficit.

I then went on to point out, that despite the gamesmanship, there is only one purpose in creating the deficit and making it an issue, and that is to eviscerate and destroy the safety net that has been built over many decades, and the protections to our health and safety, so that those who already have the bulk of the nation’s income and wealth, can further increase it at the expense of the poor and middle class.

But that does not mean that we should descend into our own fairy tale world, and pretend that the course we are on is sustainable. Increased revenue is essential, but controlling our ever-increasing costs, is equally essential.

For instance if we leave the Bush Tax cuts in place for those making $250,000 per annum or less, as has been proposed by the President, we would be increasing taxes only on the top 3% of earners and we would only be increasing tax receipts by $800 billion over 10 years. See here at 1:44 minutes. When we consider that the deficit was projected by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) at $1.3 trillion for the year 2010 alone we can see this is a piddling sum. However if all the Bush tax cuts were left in place, the deficit would be decreased over ten years by four trillion dollars, a much more significant sum, but still not enough to solve our projected deficit, which the CBO estimates at six trillion over ten years, without counting interest payments, and assuming that no laws were to be changed, which is unlikely.

But the attempt to put a rosy, but untrue, picture on our outlook can be seen from an article which appeared in the Washington Post, written by E.J. Dionne, a man who has written many insightful columns in the past, but who posits that doing nothing would lead to $7.1 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade. Now what is interesting about this is that the CBO says doing nothing would still lead to over a 3 trillion deficit over ten years, and doing nothing is unlikely. Most important, doing nothing would mean not extending the Bush tax cuts for those earning under $250,000, when the President, the Left, and the Wall Street occupiers give us the impression that if we just focus on the top 99% all will be honky dory. It’s a fairy tale! I say wake up!

Furthermore changing nothing, outside the Bush tax cuts, is neither likely nor desirable. If you will look here, you will find the Dionne article reproduced, with my comments interjected in red, showing why many of the things Dionne assumes could be left unchanged, need to be, and are likely to be changed.

Reverting again to my post of October 28th I point out that according to the Social Security Administration, “Projected long-run program costs for both Medicare and Social Security are not sustainable under currently scheduled financing, and will require legislative modifications if disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers are to be avoided.” But I go on to say, “this should be addressed, not as a budget issue, but as a sustainability issue.”

As can be seen from the above we will not solve our deficit problems with increased taxes alone, and certainly not with increased taxes on the top 1% alone, or even those making less than $250,000. We need to end the Bush tax cuts in their entirety and we must look to making intelligent cuts.

It is for that reason that I address this subject. In my post entitled "The Deficit – One Big Hoax (Part VI)" I began to address some of the areas where we could, and should, beneficially cut, and I begin with the drug wars, where, I point out that there are already major voices across the political divide calling for an end to this destructive and expensive war.

According to Bernd Debusmann, a Reuters columnist:

The budgetary impact of legalizing drugs would be enormous, according to a study prepared to coincide with the 75th anniversary of prohibition’s end by Harvard economist Jeffrey A. Miron. He estimates that legalizing drugs would inject $76.8 billion a year into the U.S. economy — $44.1 billion through savings on law enforcement and at least $32.7 billion in tax revenues from regulated sales. (For a total of 76.8 billion per annum or 760,800 billion over ten years, over 3/4 trillion. And this is before we add in the benefits to the economy. 

The war on drugs has helped turn the United States into the country with the world’s largest prison population…The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population and around 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Ibid  

In addition to the law enforcement expense, we must add in the cost of incarceration. Here we find that his cost alone amounts to over $6 trillion per year to the states with additional costs to the federal government.

We begin to see that cutting in order to deal with the deficit can be beneficial. The only purpose for reducing some benefits in entitlements is to make them sustainable.

I must add, however, that I do not favor states passing laws to make Marijuana available as a medicine. This has the effect of bypassing the FDA, and no substance should be made available for therapeutic purposes without the rigorous double blind studies, that all such drugs are required to undergo.

Comments are welcome and will be distributed with attribution unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified.