Life's Pleasures Quote by Jan Schakowsky

A politician’s cleanest weapon is arithmetic, and Jan Schakowsky loads this line with numbers that behave like a moral indictment. “50 percent” sets a crisp benchmark, the kind of managerial promise that sells big policy to a skeptical public. Then she snaps the trap shut: “6 years and $4.7 billion later” turns time and money into evidence of drift, waste, or self-deception. The cadence is prosecutorial, built for a hearing room or a floor speech where the goal isn’t nuance but leverage.

The intent is oversight with an edge: not just to question Plan Colombia’s effectiveness, but to delegitimize the premises under which it was funded. By specifying cultivation and distribution, she points to the core deliverable of a U.S.-backed counternarcotics strategy, inviting listeners to judge the program on its own stated terms rather than on softer claims (state capacity, security, alliance maintenance). The phrase “supposed to” signals a broken social contract: policymakers promised measurable outcomes; taxpayers underwrote the experiment; reality refused to cooperate.

Subtext: the “drug war” often functions as a convenient label for goals that are politically harder to admit out loud. When results are “meager at best,” Schakowsky suggests the metrics were either unrealistic or never the true north. It’s also a quiet rebuke of technocratic optimism - the idea that foreign aid plus aerial eradication and training can out-engineer a market that adapts, migrates, and reconstitutes.

Context matters: mid-2000s fatigue with post-9/11 spending, rising skepticism about interventionist fixes, and mounting evidence of displacement effects in coca cultivation. Her line is less a policy brief than a demand: if we’re going to keep paying, stop pretending the scoreboard isn’t the point.