Here's a little snip from a mcjoan diary on DailyKos that I glanced over the first time I read it, but has come back to gnaw at my brain all of last night and this morning...Show Us the Money
by mcjoan
Fri Apr 28, 2006 at 09:35:34 AM PDT
The Washington Post reports on another scandal today, one more along the usual lines of Republican chicanery, this one dealing with money. Lots and lots of taxpayers' money.
The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week. . . .
Once the war spending bill is passed, military and diplomatic costs will have reached $101.8 billion this fiscal year, up from $87.3 billion in 2005, $77.3 billion in 2004 and $51 billion in 2003, the year of the invasion, congressional analysts said. Even if a gradual troop withdrawal begins this year, war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to rise by an additional $371 billion during the phaseout, the report said, citing a Congressional Budget Office study. When factoring in costs of the war in Afghanistan, the $811 billion total for both wars would have far exceeded the inflation-adjusted $549 billion cost of the Vietnam War. (emphasis mine)
There's more of mcjoan's diary at : <
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/28/123534/903>
- - - - - - - - -
The first point which you gleaned readily from the quoted article from the
Washington Post is that the US is definitely ontrack to spend more on this neverending and misbegotten war than we did on that
other neverending and misbegotten war.
But that is not the information that has been needling my mind.
What it is is this: I'm not very good at imagining big numbers when they have to do with cash. None of us are. I grant that some of us are better than others at working with large numbers because they are people who, in their daily wanderings or interests, work with scientific notation pondering very small sizes (like atoms) or very large quantities (like the number of stars or the great distances between galaxies). But when you or I start thinking about very large numbers in relation to MONEY -- well, we just have to admit that we just don't have any experience with that. For myself I don't have that experience in my personal finances (ha ha) and not even in working with my department's annual budget (some $1.2 million).
So what does $811 billion dollars look like? I have no freakin' idea, but I'm sure someone can give some analogies downthread that would spin circles around any that I might attempt to put in this post.
Try to wrap your head around this:
$0
$8
$81
$811
$8,110
$81,100
$811,000
$8,110,000
$81,100,000
$811,000,000
$8,110,000,000
$81,100,000,000
$811,000,000,000
But that is not my point. The question that is more important to me is this:
What ELSE could have been done with that $811 billion that the Bush Administration and our Congress have just thrown away (by losing some millions of it or just handing it over via no-bid-and-apparently-no-post-audit contracts to Halliburton or Carlyle or (place other war-profiteer friend-of-Cheney company name here)).
"What else could the United States have done with $811 billion?" is a question that speaks to the very heart of values. I know, I know. "Values" has become just a word of right-wing rhetoric now and is a drastically overused and ironically, an
undervalued word.
But what
do we cherish? Bush says (in so many words) that we cherish "freedom" and in "bringing democracy" (or perhaps his handlers' twisted views of democracy) to the people of Iraq (blah, blah, blah, blah, I simply cannot continue espousing
their rhetoric in my own thread, ugh) -- which in the Administration's explanation for this Iraq debacle is the ultimate Orwellian spin of the century...perhaps the millenium. In explaining coincidences, statisticians use
the law of truly large numbers to identify the mathematical reason that so many people in a stadium will have the exact same birthday. It isn't coincidence; it is just math. To that end, I personally do not think there is anything
coincidental about how Bush and Cheney
abused the
law, intelligence and Congressional weakness to make a large amount of cash disappear into the hands of their war-profiteer and Big Oil buddies. It wasn't coincidence, or even ineptitude; it was planned that way. Do the $811B math.
So here's just one answer to the question for what else we could have done with that money:
In the 2000 US Census, it was reported that there were 281.4 million people, with 26% of them being under age 18 years for a total under-18 population of 72.3 million.
Age of the United States Population in 2000
In 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau counted 281.4 million people in the United States. Of this number, 72.3 million, or 26 percent of the U.S. population, were under age 18.
<
http://www.ferris.edu/library/Subject/Government/census.html>
$811,000,000,000 divided by 72,300,000 children equals $11,217 and change.
We could have given every child (granting that we may have a few more six years later than those census figures) some $11K for use in
Individual Accounts for their primary and secondary school education, such as for private tutoring, music lessons (my daughter's piano lessons are $80 per month), SAT preparation courses ($300), lab fees ($45 per semester), band fees (my daughter's marching band fundraising quota was $400), and for all the little books and soccer shoes and uniforms and fees and fieldtrips, etc. that come up. What a difference such a thing would make in expanding the mind of a child!
Or, (and here's my cynical despair rising)
we could have just BURNED that money in a big bonfire for all I care, rather than having spent it on this godforsaken war and the killing of troops and Iraqis.
Your turn: What else could we have done?---
tcb
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