How many taxpayer $$ per day are Iraq/Afghanistan efforts totally wasting -- any specific numbers?

?

.... perhaps the more important question.

Good luck to the OP coming up with a definition of "waste" in this regard and then applying a percentage to it.

I don't mean to be snarky, but these blanket statements (bet me that the OP will respond "100% WASTED") get a little tiresome after a while.

That's not to say that the economic benefit of getting out of those countries would not be helpful at this time.

www.costofwar.com

www.nationalpriorities.org

$57,077.60. That's what we're paying per minute. Keep that in mind—just for a minute or so.

snip

Women and men from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, will be among the first to head out. It takes an estimated $1 million to send each of them surging into Afghanistan for one year. So a 30,000-person surge will be at least $30 billion, which brings us to that $57,077.60. That's how much it will cost you, the taxpayer, for one minute of that surge.

snip

On the other hand, given the woeful inadequacy of that "safety net," we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that's roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people.

Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.

For purposes of comparison, $30 billion—remember, just the Pentagon-estimated cost of a 30,000-person troop surge—is equal to 80% of the total US 2010 budget for international affairs, which includes monies for development and humanitarian assistance. On the domestic front, $30 billion could double the funding (at 2010 levels) for the Children's Health Insurance Program and the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program.

snip


mother jones