Two quite notable but different events occurred last week. The first was that the Trump administration refused to distribute payments for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which feeds more than 40 million Americans including nearly 400,000 residents in Connecticut.
The second was that the Tesla, which has reported that it had income of more than $2 billion and paid exactly nothing, zero, in federal income tax, as has also been widely reported, plans to provide their chief executive, Elon Musk, with a pay package that could exceed one trillion dollars.
The numbers are difficult to comprehend but if you had a billion dollars (not trillion, just a billion), and spent $1,000 dollars a day, it would take 1,000,000 days or 2,740 years to spend all your money. But, if you had a trillion dollars and spent $1,000 a day, it would take over 2.7 million years to spend a trillion dollars.
Meanwhile, back on earth, the average monthly SNAP benefit for households in Connecticut is $284 and households with children $485. See how far that goes in your local supermarket.
Something is out of whack when millions of children go hungry in the most prosperous nation on Earth and a handful of billionaires have more money than they can reasonably spend.
History is filled with examples where this has not turned out well.
Tedd Levy, Old Saybrook