Word: pet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...sure why I decided to pursue Scientology as a kind of pet project. But I spent a week perusing internet sites with hyperbolic accounts of the religion’s dangers and benefits, even checking L. Ron Hubbard’s “Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health” —the book that started the religion some 50 years ago—out of Lamont. I’d spent my school year studying abstract critical theory (I’m an English concentrator), and now I wanted to study abstract religious hucksterism...
...there’s no free lunch. Spending billions on these pet projects will require either raising taxes on everyone or cutting spending on other government programs. Although the Bush administration is right to rule out tax increases to finance the reconstruction—increasing taxes would undercut our economic growth at the worst possible time—without spending cuts, the country will simply go further into debt, which amounts to simply a delayed tax increase. And with discretionary spending soaring at eight percent each year under the Bush administration, there’s little reason to believe that...
...corruption convictions over the past decade. (Neighborhing Mississippi was first.) Friends of the Bush administration are already salivating at the sight of billions in no-bid contracts, and like the reconstruction of Iraq, the money allocated for the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast is liable to windup in useless pet projects or outright malfeasance...
...they are absurdly distributed. Consider the following: Europeans spend $11 billion per year on ice cream—$2 billion more than it would cost to provide clean water and safe sewers for the world's population. Moreover, Americans and Europeans spend $17 billion per year on pet food—$4 billion more than the additional amount needed annually to provide basic health and nutrition to the whole world...
...Nobel Prize-winning economist, the problem of poverty is not one of resources, but of their allocation. There needs to be a reallocation and prioritization of the world’s resources—including the resources that you and I control. Every dollar we spend on pet food, clothes, DVDs, and the like could be spent on food, medicine, or peacekeeping operations. We privileged few with full stomachs and extra money have hard decisions to make about how we’re going to spend the extra cash that the global economic structures have bestowed...