What we could have bought with the $4 trillion we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan

BY CHRISTOPHER MIMS
30 JUN 2011 1:28 PM

Americans like us some war, but to the tune of $4 trillion? In adjusted dollars, that's just short of what it cost us to whup the Nazis.

Here's a look at what we could have done with that money, had we spent it on something besides stoking Americans' confusion over whether or not the world's 1.5 billion 'Muslims' are in fact a monolithic group whose every member is a terrorist.

Provide 280 million people with 100 percent renewable energy (based on this study of moving the entire planet to renewables).

Pay for America's entire high-speed rail system eight times over -- and that's according to a deliberately high, rail-hostile estimate from the CATO institute.

Pay for a comprehensive preschool system for every child in America 40 times over. Preschool has been shown to be one of the single most effective interventions for disadvantaged children. (Universal preschool would cost $100 billion, according to NPR's Planet Money.)

more

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-06-30-what-we-could-have-bought-with-the-4-trillion-we-spent-on-iraq-a

:cry: times millions of people's lives.

and completely insane.

And it was mostly money we didn't have in the first place.

We would be free of oil imports, the middle east oligarchs and royalty would be that much poorer, and we would be well on our way to preventing catastrophic climate change. but Nooooo! As John Belushi would say...

what we're doing could not be more wrong

we only have 400.

a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.


- Dwight D. Eisenhower

http://www.quotedb.com/speeches/chance-for-peace

It blows my mind how people can not care.

things in the world. Truly. Nothing else is more important than that. Our whole lives revolve around that sad fact.

but nary a dime from the uber-wealthy or mega corporations? :patriot: