By Sid Schwab
Dr. Ben Carson is a winning choice for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. For one thing, it’s at least three or four weeks since he admitted he’s unqualified to run any federal agency, which is more than enough time to learn the ins and outs of housing things and urban stuff. It’s not brain surgery.
Like Ben, I went through surgical training. During that period I spent time on the neurosurgery service and although I didn’t remove many brain tumors, I did live across the street from the hospital for a while, in what many would consider housing. Plus, it was super urban.
I know for a fact that Dr. Carson has also lived in houses. His current home, the one with a signed photograph of him with Jesus (some say it’s a painting, but I totally prefer to believe I’m right), has a grand staircase and colonnades, which are exactly the touches inner city housing currently lacks and so desperately needs. Talk about pride of rentership!
And it’s not just pride that Dr. Ben will create. People are saying he’ll build grain-storage pyramids in our most depressed urban centers. The beauty of this is they’ll employ lots of people during construction, which, in Egypt at least, took many years per item and maybe a hundred thousand laborers, not all of whom, it’s thought, were actual slaves. Costs, so I read online, will be totally recovered and then some, because once they’re finished we won’t need to give poor people food stamps.
If there are expensive overruns (which is unlikely because Dr. Carson’s boss knows a lot about construction and what to do in the event of bankruptcy) tax cuts on multimillionaires in Trump’s Cabinet and across the land will make up the revenue shortfall. From history we know this about tax cuts, which, coincidentally, is how we know about pyramids, too. That, and the Bible; Dr. Ben’s interpretation of it, anyway. If a former brain surgeon can’t convert cubits into inches or whatever, no one can; am I right?
I haven’t discovered what’s in the Bible regarding urban development; for sure not the Fair Housing Act, anyway, which Dr. C. doesn’t like. He found the purpose for pyramids there, though, and he’ll do the same for quarterage.
Speaking of the Bible, I’m pretty excited about Betsy DeVos, who’ll be the new Secretary of Education, if Republicans have anything to do with it, which they do. It’s an definite sign of something that pyramids come into play with her, too, seeing as how her husband’s billions come from owning Amway, which works just like one; and although it’s trickle-up and not Republican trickle-down, a trickle is a trickle. Anyhow, I’m hearing she learned a lot about public education by observing it from the private schools she and her kids attended. You can see a lot from up there. What she saw is how little the Bible is taught down here in public schools, so she’s spent lots of her soap money trying to fix that, which doesn’t require education expertise or experience which is OK with me.
I don’t know about you, but I’m glad more tax money will go to religious education and less to public schools. Reason why, I finished my public school education a long time ago, and so did everyone else in my family so we’re good. Except maybe the grandkids, but by the time they’re ready the main skills they’ll need are hunting, gathering and self-defense. For now, though, since America finally realized it’s about gut feelings and not all that factual silliness, religious education of the kind Mrs. DeVos prefers, where no one brainwashes kids with evolution, climate change or distractions like critical thinking, is exactly what we need. The more kids we produce who can figure out, just for one example, what the pyramids were for like Dr. Ben Solomon Carson did, the better off we’ll be.
I think the president-elect is off to a great start. He understands that when you don’t know your job, being rich makes up for a lot. Dr. Ben is only worth ten million or so, but Betty and Donald and the rest are billionaires. If they can’t fix poverty, who can?
Email Sid Schwab at columnsid@gmail.com.
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