You have five years to spend $1 billion dollars and you absolutely cannot spend it on yourself, family or friends, what would you do?
Don’t cheat. I know you get the idea.
I would spend it fixing up and improving my hometown of Logansport, LA that has well under 2,000 people. It is on a nice river and it has a traditional main street but it is very, very poor and run down these days . I would make it into a tourism hot-spot and fix up some of the beautiful but run down houses. I would also make the public schools top notch and pay for college for the top students. I would also make it a fishing mecca would it should be anyway but it doesn’t have the infrastructure like any hotels, nice docks, and boat rentals.
Establish a truly national DC Statehood movement - primetime TV and radio ads in every metropolitan market, massive benefit concerts and rallies, endowed chairs at universities, anything and everything I could think of. At election time, we’d dial the whole thing up to eleven, and damn well force candidates to speak to the issue. It would be glorious.
With anything left over, I’d sit down some programmers to create “so-easy-my-grandma-can-use-it” tools for internet users in authoritarian states to bypass net censorship. Take that, Great Firewall of China!
If I still have money after that, it goes into however many DC Public Charter Schools I can start up.
That’s for the first half. The second half would be used to torment universities. I’d offer Cal, for example, a $50 million endowment if they name the chair after Friedrich Hayek. Or offer Georgia Tech an endowment named after William Tecumseh Sherman. You get the idea. That way I can do good and be entertained at the same time.
Not really. My son started out playing for this one particular coach when he (my son, not the coach) was 5 years old. Since then, the coach has started up a new club on the underprivileged side of town. Now, he ( the coach this time) has hundreds of kids playing competitive soccer that otherwise would not be able to afford to play. Given a pile of money, this club might sink some of it into an improved practice venue ( as opposed to the empty lot we have now) but I suspect most of it would go towards scholarships, travel and training.
I would give it to the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Warren Buffet agrees; it seems like an efficiently administered organization that really seeks to do some good in the world by attacking some of the most fundamental problems which vex every part of humanity.
A third for scholarships, a third for Federal deficit reduction (the Bureau of the Public Debt would be glad to take the check), and a third to the Democratic National Committee.
Whenever my local PBS station has yet another goddamned pledge drive, I would call up and say:
“How much is your fundraising target? Okay, I’ll send over a cashier’s check for that amount plus an extra hundred grand… but ONLY on the condition that you end this pledge drive right now and go back to your regular programming.”
I’d donate it all for birth control and sex ed around the world.
When I think about the world’s problems, mainly to do with poverty and environmental degredation, I think how much better things would be if women had no more children than they really want and can support.
This is a great plan! The Phil Sheridan Memorial Endowment for VMI! A new building for Tuskegee called the Syphilis Experiment Memorial Student Health Center! The McCulloch v. Maryland Memorial Scholarship for The Citadel!
I’d split it between worthy charities and set up scholarships. I’ve actually been thinking about trying to set up at least one with whatever meager funds I might leave behind, since I don’t have kids. I’d love to arrange for scholarships for gifted, disadvantaged students to study veterinary medicine.
I’d be tempted to say that I’d donate a good chunk of it to my alma mater on the condition that they take one particular donor’s name OFF of one of the buildings, but that would be engaging in the same kind of financial blackmail as said donor, and I’d have less respect for the school if they actually took it – which they probably would. Oh well. I guess I’d just give a big chunk o’ change to the English department and one particular scholarship program.
Basically, I’d try to give as many low-income students as possible a) a chance to attend college without working during the semester or graduating waist-deep in loans; b) a chance to study abroad; c) decent college prep and a few fun and exciting experiences during their K-12 years (although I’m not sure how best to accomplish the last).
If enlightened self-interest is permitted, as in the OP, I would fund a complete overhaul of the public transit system in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. Currently Chapel Hill has free buses, but it’s heavily weighted to serve commuters; Saturday service is severely cut down and Sunday service is almost non-existent. I’d like to see that expanded, and better connecting service with the existing Raleigh & Durham public transit systems so I (and others) can get around more easily. There’s some talk now of adding a light rail system, but it could be years before that gets off the ground.
