As we approach $1/3 Trillion Dollars for the Lunacy that is the Iraq War

[Stinky The Clown]

What else could have been done with that money?

Today, the actual cost is something approaching $280B.

Say that in words .... Two Hundred and Eighty Billion Dollars

Imagine a country with a minimum standard of living. Not just a stupid, poverty level of subsistence minimum wage. A complete minimum stanndard of living. That would inlcude a single payer health care system for every one of our 300 million citizens. From cradle to grave. Higher education for those who have the ability - and a K-12 system that ensures virtually all our children posess at least that level of ability. Social Security that is at such a level that the least of us is better off in all respects than the best of the worst in the rest of the world. A social Security System that allows the elderly to age in place, in homes they occupy by choice, not by necessity. A system whereby we work to rehabilitate those who offend, not warehouse them in surroundings that demean, anger, and foment hate ... and a high rate of recitivism.

Imagine, too, what we can create with just a small fraction of that money. Imagine government encouraged private sector research into alternative, renewable enrgy, with a fully evolved system of sticks and carrots that encourages risk, rewards good corporate citizenship, and taxes corporate bad behavior; and criminalizes corporate bad actors by piercing more easily the veil of corporate personhood.

How much of that money would we need to make our nation truly secure for her citizens? Not by building walls, but by actively promoting cooperation with our friends and engaging in honest diplomacy with those societies we have heretofor bullied and threatened. Not by exlusionary policies, but by encouraging trade with societies that maintain acceptable levels of human decency and pay living wages, all the while discouraging, by smimilar but mirror image policies, trade with those societies that would violate our security by taking our jobs and employing draconianly horrible working conditions to produce consumer goods that undercut the price of those samne goods made by honest companies who pay fairly their own workers.

One third of trillion dollars.

It would be quite a start, wouldn't it?

http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

[Greyhound]

1. Didn't somebody get fired for suggesting it would cost $200 billion? n/t