BURNING MONEY IN IRAQ

From the New York Times courtesy of AlterNet:

What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq.

Click here for more.

It's a bit confusing with all those zeroes, but I tried to calculate what that trillion dollar price tag comes to per person: the US currently has over 300 million in population, according to Wikipedia; rounding that down, and rounding down $1.2 trillion dollars, I get $3,333 dollars for every man, woman, and child in the country. And, like I said, that's rounded down, and includes a lot of people who don't pay taxes. The actual price per tax-paying citizen is somewhat bigger-- the article also observes that the actual expenditure over Iraq may come closer to two trillion, which would double that per capita price.

You know, that's more than ten times the lousy tax refund Bush handed out back in 2001.

Obviously, we don't really have much to show for our money. Terrorism is still a big threat. Oil prices are higher, not lower, and the entire Middle East is in much more turmoil now than before. It's like we've paid a lot of money to have somebody come and hit us on the head repeatedly, except worse. Anyway, by this one standard, a cost-benefit analysis, Iraq has been a spectacular failure for the US, and bales of dollars continue to be thrown on the fire.

So much for the overrated Republican ability to spend money intelligently.

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