One TRILLION Dollars Wasted In The Middle East. What Could We Have Done With That Money?
As of May 30, in addition to the 1000th American GI casualty, the National Priorities Project calculates that we have past the one trillion dollar mark on the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. One TRILLION dollars, with a T. It's a hard number to wrap your mind around, as this Google Sketchup illustration demonstrates. It also begs the question: just what have we bought for all that money and what good could have been done with that money instead?
Brave New Films's ReThink Afghanistan has a new Facebook app that allows you to see other ways that money could have been spent:
You could choose to hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year for
$12 billion or hire 1 million public safety workers for a year for $46.5 billion, and still only have made mere drops in the bucket.
Personally, I opted to pay for four years of college for a million students, fund the clean up of the gulf oil spill, hire one million elementary school teachers and offer health care for 10 million Americans and guess what? I still didn't reach that one trillion mark.
Check out the app. Tell us how you'd spend the money. Then consider sending this to your congresscritter to ask him/her how much more blood and treasure need to be lost in the sands of the Middle East.
would have provided fresh water wells for every community in Iraq.
This really settles the question. The military is now too expensive to achieve the objectives we traditionally expect it to achieve.
You could literally bribe a country with jobs, food, and medicine for less money than you would need to secure it with today's modern military.
For 1 trillion dollars you could literally buy 72 virgins for every Muslim fundamentalist in the world and put them all up in paradise resorts for the rest of their lives.
I'm just sayin'. . . .
in the first place. Hasn't worked out so well.
until Bush decided to do what Plisko wrote.
Facebook app into a viral infestation of every computer that links
to a conservative blog.
“Why would anyone with a functioning brain believe this guy?”
Some guy with an eating disorder
turned the stone and looked beneath it....
'Peace on Earth' was all it said.
n/t
Any of the following:
- Buy up NewsCorp and dismantle FOX News. Try not to laugh when I fire Glenn Beck.
- Fund a journalism school.
- Start a news network for real, objective journalism. Immediately hire Rachel Maddow, Thom Hartmann, and the C&L Gang.
- Fund people like the guy making the Bloom Box energy system.
Put me on that 'real, objective journalism' list, please.
I think I would use the money to find Nicole Brown Simpson's and Ron Goldman's killer.
Oh wait, we already did that.
Why didn't we just give Saddam and Sons the $2 billion they asked for to leave the country?
Oh, nevermind.
Actually I believe the total cost is in the 3 trillion plus dollar range,the cost continue for years. Vet's will need healthcare, equipment will need to be replaced, etc...
high speed rail on this list.
I don't know why things like buying Dell or Twitter are on here. That's a personal investment.
Twitter, as part of the 'social media,' is involved in how the way we communicate and spread information is changing.
because at the end of the day we would still be $12 or $13 trillion in the hole.
Goodnight, Frau Blücher
All this debt just for Dick-Head Cheney and Dumbya's oil greed.
The money thrown away on these stupid military actions would be better spent ANYWHERE except where it is spent.
Without any of the current military occupations and actions our military is overfunded and the lack of oversight has created a monster.
As I always say - we should have listened to Dwight D.
"I know that there are people who do not love their fellow
man, and I hate people like that! " ~ Tom Lehrer (1928 - )
And speaking of Dwight D.
This is must see....
http://www.sonyclassics.com/whywefight/
.
Provide free mental health care for every person who voted for Bush a second time . Free mental health care for every Fox , Beck ,Savage or Limbaugh fan . Build and fund more insane asylums .
Insanity , it is what it is , there is no understanding it .
... it's a treatable condition with a low recurrence.
I don't know how I would spend 1 trillion dollars, but expect China does. They own most of that debt. I wonder how they are going to spend the interest? I wonder what they will do when we can't pay up?
One thing they're doing: building 42 more high speed trains over the coming year. Here in the US, we have one in the works--somewhere in Florida... over a tiny few miles...
I get it alright ( the chart ) but who made the shopping check list ? LOL
Insanity , it is what it is , there is no understanding it .
And a generous serving of Humble Pie for dessert!
George Orwell had it right in 1984. I believe he said something about perpetual war against an enemy. Well I guess your country has it and the credit card needs to be torn up or taken away.
we had a relatively calm world and budget surpluses.
I'd say the right has been thorough in turning the
world around. Anyone see PBS's "The Ascent of Money"
last year? We find ourselves in the same position
as 1914 Germany(investor nation) and England(mortgaged to
the hilt overspenders) with China today. The show warns
of this situation, that an international incident could cause
this credit market relationship to freeze up, which then is the
real trigger for war. We've had one incident in Korea, and
now with Isreal, I predict more to come this year till they
get it right. We've flooded the world with arms in the last few years, time to blow the place up!
The amount of damage done by GW Bush will be with us for decades. Was it part of a plan? Who knows.
What I do know is this, we now have literally unlimited excuses to wage war, to invade countries that are not a threat, to spend literally anything on those flights of conquest lest you be called a traitor, carte blance to torture, destroyed our international relationships (do you think the Turks putting themselves into the middle of the Gaza mess is about humanitarian issues? No, its about the U.S. treating them like a second class citizen while we dump money into endless cesspools like Pakistan), fractured our own population with divisive and non negotiable positions on public interest and foreign policy issues. I could go on and on.
Vote GOP and move forward to the 18th Century.
I think your following paragraph answers your question.
The end of the Cold War scared the crap out of these guys
and they had to wait for Clinton to get out of office,
install their people and then work on disrupting everything.
Torture has absolutely nothing to do with information gathering, it's done to inflame the passions of "the other side", guaranteeing yourself an endless supply of enemy combatants.
The whole world is being played for the enrichment and enjoyment
of a certain few.
I played the facebook 'game' without checking my math. I added 3 to 5 of everything I 'wanted' (mostly education and health care options) and I still had 587 billion to spend!!
Don't people get it?!?! It's OUR sweat and blood that flows to DC for these puerile hedonists we've 'elected' to represent us to spend wisely for our collective benefit!!!!!!!!!
Do they honestly believe we won't rise up and scotch their hegemony? Do they?!?!
.
remember, these wars kept the bad guys from coming over here to get us. Don't forget that.............a trillion dollars buys a lot of security.
On second thought, for that kind of money, we could have built gates around every neighborhood in the country and hired a security guard for each as well!
Better yet, what if we built a giant bubble over the country to protect us and to keep out the vermin?
Mission accomplished.
but GI is an Army term, I believe.
I like to calculate it in subway miles.
Subways are expensive. Around $200 million per mile.
$1 Trillion is thus enough to build about 5000 miles of subway.
Major subway systems like NY, London, Paris have a few hundred miles of subway.
The wars have now cost us significantly more than enough to build full subway systems in every American city with more than 1 million people. We would actually have run out of useful subway systems to build had we spent the money in that way several years ago.
So, I don't know. Finish the subways and build high speed rail linking every US city you just built a subway in.
It is actually really hard to come up with any single project that could soak up the money and not just be wasting it.
I live in L.A. and I had three appt's around town the other day - six and a half hours of driving. Really, if there's a hell, this is it. I don't understand a populace that thinks it's o.k. to spend a quarter of your life stuck in traffic.
High speed rail and subways opens up commerce everywhere and would drastically decrease our use of fossil fuels.
It's truely sad that next to nothing ever seems to get done in this country.
That 1 trillion could have been given to the banks.
could have cure death. I could have made men into gods. Twenty billion dollars for R&D would have given us unlimited fusion energy. Twenty billion dollars could cure malaria. Fifty billion dollars would cure Aids. 200 hundred billion dollars could cure cancer.
Given that the choice would have had to be made on Dubya's watch with a Publican Congress, the trillion would have been spent as a tax cut for Houston billionaires.
At home - education, healthcare, infrastructure...
World wide - a dent in hunger, disease, illiteracy...
I know. I'm wun o' them bleedin' hart commie pinko libruls, you betcha.
I wonder how much public transportation, ie TRAINS, this would have paid for.
Bush and Cheney's plan worked perfectly. And I don't mean the oil, I mean the raping of the populace in order to fill their own coffers.
because it looks they will never be held responsible for their actions or lack thereof (in regards to 9/11 warnings) in this life.
Wow. The guys we have zooming around and killing people over there,
the millitary and contract warriors,
are an expensive way to
getnot things done."Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
One billion Big Macs?
Diabolus est Deus Inversus
list and more. Army Future Combat system, replace every Nimitz with a shiny new Ford, two subs a year and both LCS designs, new rifle for the Army, F-35, All of it AND pay the troops Blackwater size salaries.
Am I the only one to realize that the war is still being fought in Iraq and Afghan and that Obama is spending billions in both countries? Let's just all pretend there is no war in the Middle East since one of our own Obama is running the country now.
The reality is that this money will always be spent either on war or not at all. the military has always been primarily about funneling huge globs of tax revenues to a small number of wealthy people(not even necessarily wealthy American)
This systemic institutionaliized crime has been going on forever and I'm pretty sure, alas, will continue.
If it should change I'd like an electric Harley Davidson.
We could really use that cash in the US right now. Obama is at least pulling us out of the money black hole by 2011 and hopefully he can do it faster. Screw the right-wingers that want us there for the rest of the new decade! Lets get moving, Mr. President! Bring the troops and the needed money home!
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