My Point of View: Pt 3 “Is the Money Out There?”

By now you’re likely saying, of course it is.

I.e., money is out there to pay down national debt.

We certainly have a lot of hard-earned money to spend on a lot of other stuff so we can’t all of a sudden cry poor.

We know that bottled water is an estimated $100 billion a year industry (it was little more than a novelty market ten years ago) and that’s because consumers - aka citizens of many deeply indebted countries - spend $100 billion per year on water, 25 per cent of which is reprocessed municipal tap water.

We know we spend millions on Oreo cookies per year.

On all snack foods we spend billions.

I found the following US figures in a State of the Industry Report  re Cookies & Crackers category (formerly Snack Food), and for Canada we can divide the figures roughly by 10 and still be in the billions.

In 2000, US consumers spent $10,654,200,000 on cookies and crackers. In 2001 - $10,899,200,000; in 2002 - $11,128,100,000; 2003 - $11,217,100,000; 2004 - $11,295,600,000, and so it goes.

And it’s not as if cookies and crackers are as essential as a healthy nation.

Nor is Coca-Cola essential, but ‘today, products of the Coca Cola Company are consumed at the rate of more than one billion drinks per day.’ (Please click here for excessive details.)


And just out of curiosity, do you know who chugs down more Coca-Cola beverages annually, India's 1.1 billion consumers or Mexico's 108 million drinkers?

According to Coke's 2005 annual report, Mexicans lead the world by drinking some 533 8-ounce servings of Coke beverages per capita annually. India is near the bottom of the list, accounting for 6 servings per capita each year.

These statistics compare with 431 annual servings In the United States, and a worldwide benchmark average of 77 servings.

The per-serving numbers for other international markets are as follows: Chile (377), Australia (323), Belgium (323), Spain (305), Norway (280), Israel (254), Argentina (253), Canada (247).

Hey, we’re in a Top Ten list for something, but not without great cost to our health care system.

According to Wikipedia, ‘since 1985 in the U.S., Coke has been made with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) instead of the more expensive cane-sugar. Some nutritionists caution against consumption of HFCS because it may aggravate obesity and type-2 diabetes more than cane sugar.

(FYI - The cost of obesity-related diseases to the US each year = $147 billion; in Canada, surely in the billions too).

But many Canadians suck it back while our health care system sucks up the hidden costs.

You can see where I’m going with this, can’t you?

The money is indeed out there to pay off the national debt - at least faster than we are doing at present (which we're not), or in the past (20% of the time in the last 54 years).

Don't healthy revenue streams exist around every corner and across every retail counter?

I mean, it’s not like we’re poor.


Why, if I included like information about Canadian beer sales for 2009 from the Brewers Association of Canada, we'd soon be singing the chorus from my latest hit single together.

“We’re pissing our money away,
We’re pissing our money away,
We swim in our comforts most every day,
We’re pissing our money away.”

Cheery thought, eh?

The money is out there.

***

Please click here to read PT 4, the conclusion to "Is the Money Out There?".

I seem to be having fun so far, don’t I?

But my final thoughts aren’t any fun at all.

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