But, wait! There’s more! Stop the war now and we’ll include a lovely set of Ginsu knives for every household in America!
Published by Kyso Kisaen January 18th, 2007 in Bush is a cock, Governmental Failures, Moola, War, War HUH! What is it good for?In war, like in home redecorating or computer upgrading, your initial guess about how much money and time you’ll be spending is always a bit low. Part of the reason it’s important to set a strict budget for yourself is so that you have a baseline against which to judge how insane you are going when you, inevitably, run over.
With that in mind, could you imagine how fucked we’d be if Bush & Co. hadn’t planned for a modest $50 billion war? Because we’re now up to $700 billion in what the Times calls “direct spending,” and it estimates a total eventual expenditure of 1.2 trillion dollars.
And that’s the conservative estimate.
In the days before the war almost five years ago, the Pentagon estimated that it would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President Bush fired him in part for saying so…
…over the full course of the war, an eventual total of $700 billion in direct spending.
Let’s pause and reflect on the term trillion. A trillion is a 1 with 12 zeros at the end of it:
1, 000, 000, 000, 000. I can’t even deal with that many zeros. I think of it as 10^12.
It’s a million (1,000,000) piles of a million.
If the objects in your pile are dollar bills, great! We’ll need between one and two of these sets of piles to:
-pay for the direct costs of the war
-take care of the vetrans
-replenish our military hardware and readiness (I guess we’re seeing some savings here by not giving the soldiers the proper gear in the first place)
-and other sundry expenses
If that doesn’t piss you off enough, the business section of the New York Times engaged in a little thought experiment: what else could we have done with that kind of cash?
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.
But we’re not done yet! Why, we could even buy security, real security, the kind that doesn’t eat our children’s economic futures while growing newer and angrier terrorists!
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.
So for the cost of the Iraq war, we could immunize the world’s children, educate our own, fix New Orleans, make ourselves safer, actually help out Darfur and complete the job that we initially set out to do three years ago in Afghanistan! Remember Afghanistan? That tiny detail? The slightly more justified part of our use of military force in the Middle East? The part of the war people actually signed up to fight? Because that’s where the terrorists were? Back before we made sure they were everywhere?
If that bit doesn’t make your head explode, nothing ever will.
If you’re not depressed enough, then take a break from these cold, hard numbers and look for a more human facet of the story:
In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.
Dammit, Appletree, I was having an OK day until I found that link on your blog.
“In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.”
Teacher? Helping kids learn? What kind of a pansy-ass job would that have been anyway…? Hey, and now he gets free medical care from the VA!
I’m sure Bill Kristol and the rest of those suit-wearing cumstains would be happy to spend ten-of-thousands more “Jason Pooles”, and trillions of dollars more, just to make sure that no one EVER thinks they have small dicks…
The trillions and the blood would all be worth it…
Meh, we’ve always had too many teachers hanging around anyway.
Kyso, seriously, the whole thing makes me so sick and disgusted I don’t know what to do.
I know you, Marc, Amanda, Pam, and rest of the left-blogosphere feel the same way. We’re all powerless to influence the tiny, corrupt minds of the Right Wing Authoritarians.
I just hope there’s karmic justice…
USA Today reported on 16 January 2007 in its Washington Section that the CIA plans to utilize more open sources and blogs in its intelligence work and outsource more of its intelligence software development to commercial contractors in an attempt to re-establish itself as the premiere world intelligence agency.
The “Strategic Intent” is posted on the CIA public web site. Defense Industry Daily further reports that General Electric is gobbling up Smith’s Industries for $4.8B.
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/2007/01/ge-buys-smiths-aerospace-for-48b/index.php
I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak. Let’s look at this for a moment and do our patriotic duty by reading along with the CIA (after all, they have announced they are reading this blog)
1. The new CIA approach comes exactly at the formation of the agency’s new “External Advisory Board”, which consists of the following:
* A former Pentagon Chairman of the Joints Chief who is now a Northrop Grumman Corporation Board Member
* A deposed Chairman of the Board of Hewlett Packard Corporation (HP)
* A Former Deputy Secretary of Defense who now heads up a Washington think tank with Henry Kissinger
2. Northrop Grumman Corporation and Hewlett Packard are two huge government contractors in the Pentagon and CIA custom software development arena. Their combined contracts with the government just for IT are in the multiples of millions. I wonder what the advisory board is filling the CIA’s ear with?
3. Washington “Think Tanks” are fronts for big time lobbies, sophisticated in their operations, claiming non-partisanship, but tremendously influential on K Street. If a lobby cannot buy its way in, why not sit on the advisory board?
4. GE already has the military aircraft jet engine market. In buying Smith’s, it takes one more major defense corporation out of the opposition and further reduces the government’s leverage through competition. GE now joins the other monoliths such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon with tremendous leverage in the $500B per year defense market.
5. Note the synergy that now exists between the Pentagon and the CIA. Note the influence by the major corporations.
6. Also note the balance in your bank account and your aspirations for the generations of the future. Both are going down.
7. The huge Military Industrial Complex (MIC) continues to march. Taxes and national debt will be forced to march straight up the wall to support it. Do you have any “Intelligence” to offer the Pentagon, the CIA and the MIC? For further inspiration please see:
http://www.rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com
what else could we have done with that kind of cash?
Not to mention the fact that we don’t even have this money. It’s a good thing the Chinese think we’re good for it!
I don’t think the Chinese think we’re “good for it”, I think they’re just trying to decide the best time to foreclose…