For $300 Billion We Could Buy…
by paradox
Nailing down the real monetary cost of the Iraq War is problematic—currently the US has spent $155 billion, the President’s latest $82 billion request brings the total to $200 billion officially allocated, and it seems extremely safe to say total US monetary costs for the war will be at least $300 billion.
For what? The latest insanity from the White House is that all this money is justifiably spent for Iraqi “democracy” where the Sunnis did not vote and candidates had to be kept secret. One could presume that the United States is awash with cash and that our citizens don’t have any needs to be met, since we can spend so lavishly on other countries. Had we spent that money domestically, we could have bought:
- 200 new World Trade Center Towers
- 3,000 new public schools
- 3,000 miles of new municipal Light Rail
- At least doubled US auto efficiency average by 2015 by investing in hybrid research
- 400,000 children to attend a year of Head Start
- Given 186,000 children health care for a year
- Hired 5.5 million public school teachers for a year
- Given out 15 million public university four-year scholarships
- Built 30 million public housing units
- Fully funded global hunger relief efforts for 12 years
- Fully funded world-wide AIDS programs for 30 years
- Insured that every child globally could get basic immunizations for 102 years
- Built 75 new Nimitz class aircraft carriers
- Paid the entire California textbook budget for 19 years
- Paid for 545,000 state-of-the-art electronic voting machines with paper trails
Of course the United States is deeply in hock with a total debt approaching 7 trillion dollars and an annual deficit in the $400 billion range, or $2 billion dollars a day. For the United States to be spending $300 billion in Iraq while our own kids don’t have textbooks and we’re further in debt by $2 billion dollars a day is pure insanity.
Our "liberal" press corps covers the cost of the war, its gross unfairness, implications and priorities precisely like they cover Jeff Gannon: not at all, or if they do in mumbling, buried stories. They can continue to pull this nauseating ass-kissing, and The Left Coaster will continue to publish the real truth:
The cost of the Iraq War is obscene, there isn’t any real auditing of how this money is being spent, our own citizens desperately need the spending for basic necessities, and the $300 billion exacerbates an already insane fiscal policy. George Bush seems more than happy to squander our money on total failure while nobody speaks for the citizens of America, who are being neglected and saddled by incredible debt for this utter failure.