Whistleblower, isolated for revealing misinformation campaign about lyme disease.
With all the talk of the US wanting to buy Greenland, I had to ask 'what would it cost?' If Denmark were willing to sell at any price, $200 billion in cash along with $100 billion in infrastructure would be a generous price to Denmark who loses money owning Greenland, a generous price to the people of Greenland who would see a massive quality of life improvement; and still a good deal to the US. How much is $300 billion to the US? The US currently has a $1.7 trillion dollar annual deficit, on the one hand the US is hemoraging cash; on the other hand it's basically a rounding error. If you had a $1.7 trillion dollar deficit or a $2 trillion dollar deficit that included buying a country, it's barely a difference and the second comes with a country that is key in Arctic routes and defense.
This got me thinking about other things, there's not really any other countries that it would be wise to try and buy; the only other matter of significance is the Panama canal that should never have been given away (I like Jimmy Carter, but this wasn't his best move.) One of the suggestions about Greenland was paying each Greenland citizen $100k (for clarity, that's $5.7 billion; peanuts when buying a country.) I thought about 'what would it cost the US to give every newborn a million dollars' which of course would be about $3 trillion. But, they could invest $180k into each newborn in the S&P 500 and at 10% annual growth they'd be millionaires at age 18. If they used the S&P dividend ETF, they could reinvest the dividends and owe no taxes as qualified dividends under a certain amount are not taxed) and still hit that million dollar mark at 18 and have a $50k annual income that grows at 5% annually. That would only cost $600 billion a year (after buying greenland 1 year after that the deficit would be 2.3 trillion annually, it went from just under $2 trillion to $2 trillion to just over $2 trillion.) You see the psychological chain there. We could make it law that millionaires take care of their parents in retirement, that helps lower medicare costs. Of course, I'm generally kidding; Denmark isn't selling and everyone who is not born this year would complain that they didn't get an investment into them, on the plus side it would get birth rates up.
Then I thought 'who could actually do this'? A rich person could loan their newborn money to invest in the S&P 500 at a low interest rate, at 4% $180,000 would be $1200/mo; then make gifts to their kid (any amount under $25k/yr per person giving to each recipient can be a tax free gift as long as it qualifies.) This would avoid the issue of giving your kid a large amount and having to pay taxes on money you already paid taxes on by giving it to them, though there are one time gift exemptions of several hundred thousand. Even the upper middle class who could afford this would have trouble actually doing it unless they used their own cash, it's much easier to borrow money against securities you own than it is to borrow money to buy securities.