Donald Trump is, to put it mildly, stupid. But have you ever wondered exactly how stupid he is? What if there was a way to put an actual number to his level of stupidity?
Well, there is a way. And since money is the only thing that matters to Donald Trump and Republicans, that number should be a dollar figure. We will roughly calculate this based on Trump's proposal for controlling forest fires.
One of the major causes of forest fires in recent years is climate change. Donald Trump is relentless in denying this basic fact. He thinks that we can stop forest fires by raking, which he said the president of Finland told him was how they prevented fires (note: Finland is near the Arctic Circle and has 187,000 lakes). The Finnish president denied ever saying this.
Trump doubled down on stupidity in an interview on Fox News last November, this time claiming that a governor of "a certain state, I won't say which," told Trump they tested raking forests and that it stops forest fires. The reason Trump won't say which states is because he's lying and doesn't want to be embarrassed, as he was when the Finnish president called him on his lie.
So, down to brass tacks.
According to a 2014 USDA report, there were 819 million acres of forest and woodlands in the United States in 2012. California alone has 33 million acres of forest.
So, how long does it it take you to rake your yard? A couple of hours? We'll just say two hours. The average American yard is 0.22 acres. That means it takes 4.5 hours to rake an acre. The average lawn maintenance worker made $11.53 an hour in 2012, and that price has only gone up since then. But we'll low-ball it and use that number.
It would take 148,500,000 hours to rake all 33 million acres of California's forests, at a cost of $1.7 billion. That's 74,250 man years.
If we apply the Trump forest fire solution to the entire country, it would take 3.7 billion hours (1.8 million man years) and cost $42 billion. Every year. Forever.
So, where do we put all those leaves and pine needles that those workers rake up? And how do we get those leaves and needles out of those forests, many of which have no roads? And what happens to the animals and insects that live in those forests when all these guys with leaf blowers and rakes come tearing though? And what happens to the trees when they no longer have the nutrients that decaying dead leaves put back in the soil?
So that's how stupid Donald Trump is: 42 billion.
Given the dire straits a lot of employers are in these days trying to find people who will do menial jobs like lawn maintenance, where are we going to find 1.8 million people working full time raking forests?
For a start, I hear that 10 immigrant groundskeepers who worked illegally at Trump's Westchester golf club are newly available.
How can anyone take this clown seriously? He's a stupid, senile old man who thinks you can solve forest fires by raking. Now, I doubt he really believes this is an actual solution to forest fires. What he's doing is insulting the intelligence of everyone who's listening, in particular his supporters.
He has been feeding his voters a completely stupid and unrealistic line of bullshit on everything from forest fires to immigration, while at the same hiring hundreds of foreigners -- many illegally -- to work at his golf courses, hotels and clubs to do jobs that he categorically refuses to give to Americans.
Trump voters get really mad at liberals who think they're stupid. But Trump constantly treats them like morons, feeding them an idiotic diet of total bullshit of every day, while taking their support for granted.
No comments:
Post a Comment