Fun With Math

After Super Tuesday, Mike Bloomberg had acquired forty-four delegates. Estimates put his campaign spending thus far at approximately four hundred million dollars. A quick estimate puts the expense per delegate at around ten million dollars apiece. If you're jumping on your calculator, I will save you the trouble: that's just a tad more than nine million dollars each. Chump change for a billionaire.
Ready for another one?
The city of Flint, Michigan estimates it will cost fifty-five million dollars to solve their contaminated water problem. Additional information here: Tom Steyer, who has recently suspended his campaign for president, dropped two hundred million dollars into his recently suspended campaign. Add those two billionaire's campaign spending together and you come up with around six hundred million dollars.
You may have already anticipated where this freight train is going, but let's do the math. That money could have been used to bring clean, healthy drinking water to Flint, Michigan almost eleven times over. That would fix a problem. That wouldn't be just putting money into badges, posters, stickers and T-shirts. And those inflatable things that make noise when you bang them together.
Yes, I understand that there are plenty of individuals who believe in their heart of hearts that anything short of a Bloomberg or Steyer victory in this year's presidential election is as big a catastrophe as the lack of drinkable water in Flint, Michigan. A wide-eyed perspective might suggest that either of these two gentlemen may have used their bully pulpit to make certain that all Americans everywhere have clean water coming from their taps.
At the taxpayer's expense.
In a related item, a lot of hullabaloo was raised about our current "president" donating a his salary, or a quarterly portion of it, to the Department of Health and Human Services to support their work responding to the Coronavirus outbreak. I would not sneeze at the one hundred thousand dollars he signed over, but it is important to note this is a man who has run up a tab of just over one hundred thirty million dollars during his three years in office for golf. Those are some pretty steep greens fees. That's a lot of golf.
And that's a lot of zeroes.