Waterfalls of Money

Hector Falls - Royce L. Bair

In my post about Serebin I mentioned that their project was being funded by a 'waterfall of money'. Then I got to thinking about how impressive waterfalls are. There is just a torrent of water rushing by breakneck speeds. You keep your distance if you are smart because you just dip a toe into that stream and it's liable to jerk you off your feet and drag you to your doom. On the other hand you don't need to actually touch it, just standing near will get you soaked.

Government is like a whole series of waterfalls. Up top we have a reservoir that is constantly being replenished by the streams of imaginary money from the misty mountains of Mordor. Of course, we have an army of servents / slaves / true believers passing buckets of water up the hill to help to fill the reservoir, though I wonder why we bother since we can apparently get all the water we want from over the hills and far away.

The reservoir is up at the top of our mythical mountain. There is one big gate which controls how much water flows out. It's usually wide open and water is rushing out in a torrent. Occasionally Congress gets in a snit and threatens to close the gate, but its' not something I worry about. 

The torrent from the big gate falls into a big pool a little ways down the hill. This pool has a bunch of gates directing water / money to any number of industries, departments, companies or consortiums. These gates are also pretty much wide open all the time. Occasionally the flow in one or another might be restricted a bit and sometimes an old will be shut and a new one will be opened, though usually the newness is just a new name painted on the gate.

The streams from all those gates fall into smaller pools that also have a bunch of gates, and those streams flow into even smaller pools that also have a bunch of gates, and so it  goes on down the side of the hill until it gets to the point that a gate is directed solely into somebodies pocket.

However, each time water flows through a gate, it is going to give off a spray, as I noted earlier, you can get pretty well soaked just by standing near the stream. Those who are higher on the mountain are going to get the spray from the big streams so they are going to get very wet. Now imagine all that water is money. There are probably as many people standing by the waterfalls as there are people actually getting their pockets filled at the bottom of the mountain.

The thing about waterfalls is that they are all impressive. Big ones are more impressive, but even a small one viewed from up close is impressive, especially if you are thirsty. It's all a matter of perspective, i. e. how high you are in the pecking order. So project Serebin was working on was probably way down on the mountain, but viewed from an individual's perspective, it was still pretty impressive.

The government spent 6.27 trillion dollars last year. That's 200 thousand dollars per second. One second of that stream would undoubtedly make your life easier. I should also note that if we divided the 6.27 trillion amongst all the citizens we would each get like 20 grand.