"Detroit facing corpse surplus," was the headline of an article a contemporary of mine graciously e-mailed me the other day. That's right, "Detroit facing corpse surplus." I've received plenty of news about corpses in Detroit in the past including one about the Lions' defense, as well as "Detroit authorities ignored reports of corpse frozen in block of ice" which was about people continuing to play hockey on the frozen floor of an abandoned warehouse despite the leg of a frozen man, shoe and all, jutting out of the makeshift rink. Not to forget "Detroit man charged with mutilation of corpse," which I will just leave for you to imagine what transpired in that sunny piece of journalism. However, I have never received "Detroit facing corpse surplus;" an article that led me, under further investigation, to the gruesome details of Detroit's Wayne County morgue overflowing with the deceased because their families, as well as the county, are unable to pay for cremation. This is by far the saddest sign of the times I've heard, yet not only because is it obviously devastating to be forced to abandon a loved one in limbo without ceremony like that, but also because ceremonial burial is arguably what really sets us apart from being animals.
The whole story got me thinking about Detroit's corpse of an economy and the amount of money that has already been spent bailing out the city's auto triumvirate and our country as a whole. All while the city of Detroit itself can't afford to bury its own dead, which can only naturally progress to them walking the streets at night, feasting on the brains of the living and letting out horrible, blood-curdling howls of a hunger that can never be satiated. I don't know enough about the intricacies of our national economic infrastructure to argue the effectiveness or ethics of how our money is being spent. However, I can't help but attempt to wrap my head around exactly how much skrilla our country is throwing down and what it could've been spent on instead.
The American government has spent an estimated $2.8 trillion to date to help the financial sector, with a recent watchdog report to Congress stating the figure is actually closer to a whopping $4.7 trillion - more than a third of our GDP. Overall, the government has committed to give about $11 trillion to the problem: $700 billion in Trouble Asset Relief Program (TARP), $6.4 trillion in Federal Reserve rescue efforts, $1.2 trillion in federal stimulus programs, $182 billion in AIG, $38.8 billion in Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) bank takeovers, $1.7 trillion in other financial initiatives and $745 billion in other housing initiatives.
It's hard to judge how much money all that is when it's such an intangibly large number as $4.7 trillion, so let's try to think of it in tangible ways. That money could make every adult beverage Americans buy free for the next 30 years, fill Yankee Stadium several times, pave Miami University's entire campus with $100 bills 60 times, ostensibly fund the nation's entire education budget for five years, NASA for 267 years, the war in Iraq for 47 years or buy back every Nickelback album ever sold and have them launched into space. That's $15,000 per American spent already. With that kind of money almost every American could be freed of debt and so many of us wouldn't have to sell out in these harsh economic times. It'd also be enough to supply every man, woman and child in America with a lifetime supply of lungs filled with the crisp, clean, never overpowering menthol taste of Newport cigarettes, after all, Newports are alive with pleasure!
Maybe launching Nickelback albums into the cold reaches of space or giving Americans a lifetime of free booze or cigarettes isn't the most prudent picture of what the money could do, but that's what that money does, it loses meaning at a point. To be fair, each lost job costs taxpayers a lot of money, but when a few people on Capitol Hill are deciding the allocation of trillions upon trillions of dollars, it's hard to think about how just a sliver of that could make monumental changes in small things like helping kids pay for college, or simply keeping corpses off the streets in Detroit.
