More fun with math

[lapfog_1]

with the current addition of the $97 Billion dollar supplemental appropriation bill passing today, it was reported that the total amount of money spent on Iraq ( and Afghanistan ) has reached $400 Billion.

That's about $16,000 for every man, woman, and child living in Iraq (if you can call what they have there "a life").

I wonder what the Iraqis think of this (if someone were to tell them)...

I'm thinking that $16,000 per person buys a whole *lot* of flowers with which to greet the liberating US forces. :sarcasm:

[KyuzoGator]

1. How long could we have given every American health care for $400B?

Years? A decade?

[dcfirefighter]

3. At $1300 a person, not very long. nt

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. not true, because most people don't need health care.

400B goes a LONG WAY. hell, just apply it to prenatal and postnatal care for the poor, and you end up saving trillions in the future. Use it to figure out if mercury preservatives are related to autism, and prevent that, and you save trillions more, not to mention heart aches and personal horrors for hundreds of thousands of families.

[lapfog_1]

8. I could get you a decent group insurance policy for

25 million people at $1600 per person... but only if they all move a less dangerous (to their health) location

[tecelote]

2. Yeah, imagine if we fought a different type of war.

How about a war on poverty?

That would bring peace about much faster than war does.

Of course, "Peace" has to be an intended goal first.

[displacedtexan]

5. We had one of those (a war on poverty), but Nixon killed it.

It was a major part of LBJ's Great Society.

The Great Society & LBJ

Programs:

WAR ON POVERTY

OTHER PROGRAMS

SOCIAL PROGRAMS

Social programs

CIVIL RIGHTS LEGISLATION UNDER LBJ

Civil rights
***

Ahem.

"Community action" was the part of the program that progressives liked most, and the part, of course, that the Great Society's critics liked least of all. By 1969, the fight against the OEO's community funding program had become one of the era's great political showdowns. As the New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann put it, at OEO, Republicans "could win battle stars." Enter Donald Rumsfeld, a super-ambitious ex-fighter pilot elected to Congress from Illinois.

No one disliked the program more than then-President Richard Nixon, who saw the whole apparatus as a government way to fund the left. Upon his election, Nixon appointed Rumsfeld to direct the OEO. Rumsfeld, in turn, hired Dick Cheney. It was at OEO that they worked together for the first time. They were joined by another future Cabinet secretary: Christine Todd Whitman, whose influential Republican connections won her first government post at OEO.

More...

[Betsy Ross]

6. During the Viet Nam war,

the story goes, that the cost of war would have bought EVERY Viet Namese family a track house and a station wagon which would have done more to battle communism than our war.

[lapfog_1]

7. Uh, if you imagine that every Iraqi family

has 2 parents, 1 or 2 grand-parents, and 2 to 3 chrildren, that would be $96,000... which would buy a decent home in a non-urban US town... but maybe not enough left over for the SUV... OTOH, the war in Iraq is far from over!

[AllegroRondo]

9. Thats over $250K per minute

amazing.