Saturday, June 28, 2008

Zimbabwe

We won't be going there anytime soon.

After doing a brief study of the country via the cia world book ( I love getting something for my tax dollars). The country is in a mess. I know Shrub and his gang won't be in there anytime soon as they have no oil. But that seems to be the least of their troubles. In addition to having to import all of their oil they must purshase part of their electricity from neighboring countries. Mugabe put a freeze on prices that caused a run on food leaving stores empty. With short supplies inflation is through the roof. 30,000 Zimbabwe dollars are equal to one U.S. dollar. Unemployment is at 80%. Life expectancy is 39 years. The only exports of value are gold and platinum. Their total exports are 1.2 billion. Not a great prize for Shrubco.
The government put up an electric fence at the borders not to prevent invaders but to keep people from leaving. We have seen recently that after the crack down on the opposition party that people are fleeing the country. The people have pleaded for the U.S. or the U.N. to intervene but there is no indication that that will happen.

2 comments:

Gary ("Old Dude") said...

Your first sentence says it all---pure liberal blue-state thinking---you love getting stuff from the government ------us republicans believe we the people should keep more of our dollars at home, not be taxed for government give-a-ways

MRMacrum said...

gjg - then you Republicans need to stop acting like Democrats. For the life of me, it is getting harder and harder to tell you two apart.

I heard a comment by some fellow calling into a political radio show on my way back to Maine. He couldn't figure out why anyone without a million dollars in the bank would ever want to be a Republican. I thought about what he said. Given the way of the current Republican trends at the leadership level, I'd say he was onto something.

Taxed for government giveaways? The recent military/weapons package to Israel may not have been a giveaway in the purist sense, but the stupidly deep discounts they got we are paying for through our taxes. Why are we still giving them such good deals? Is their economy in worse shape than ours? Are they struggling to make ends meet?

When we give weapons and materiel-it's aid. When we give humantarian help - it's a giveaway.

Semantics is the game here. Both sides want to give away our tax money.