Excellent Eddy in today's DM Register

[CornField]

Link: http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060124/OPINION03/601240345/1110

War's High Price: Cost includes the investments neglected at home

You can't put a price tag on national security. When the survival of the nation is at stake, you spend whatever it takes and don't quibble over costs.

But the invasion of Iraq was a war of choice, not of survival. Americans should not only be aware of the costs of the war, but also consider whether the money might have been better spent at home.

...

Even $1 trillion is a huge sum. Stiglitz notes that it's enough to keep Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, twice over.

As an investment in our nation's future, it's enough to pay for:

• Four years at a private college (average cost about $21,000 per year) for nearly 48 million American young people.
  
• Four years at a public university (average cost $5,500 per year) for more than 180 million Americans.
  
• Wiring virtually every home in American for broadband Internet, at a cost of $200 billion, and have $800 billion left to spend. (Connecting every home and business in America with broadband internet would produce an estimated $500 billion in additional economic growth. That's an example of how investing money here at home can pay bigger dividends than investing in foreign wars.)
  

(Much more at link)

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There's also a sidebar in the print version that you won't see online. A box, one column by about 2.5 inches: "How much is a trillion?"

Text:

How much is a trillion?
With all the zeros, a trillion dollars looks like:
$1,000,000,000,000
That's enough for 10,000 Powerball jackpots of $100 million each.
It would pay for the roughly $5 billion state general-fund budget for Iowa for the next 200 years.
It makes something like the proposed high-speed rail network to serve the Midwest, costing an estimated $3.5 billion, seem like a trifle. A trillion dollars would build 285 such networks.

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IMO, these are the things we need to hammer into the general American public. This investment in Iraq is not going to benefit us. This investment in Iraq has not made us and the world more safe. If anything, it has made us less safe! Because we are spending so much money to launch and continue this war of choice (not of necessity), we have less money to launch initiatives at home which could be benefiting all sectors of our society (including the recommendations for security as outlined by the 9-11 Commission).

George W. Bush may want to be the War on Terror President, but his track record has shown him to be short-sighted and ineffective in protecting and securing the American people and their future.

[Bluzmann57]

1. The side bar is telling

If people know just how much a trillion dollars really is, it would wake them up, imo. The reference to powerball jackpots is especially telling, as a lot of people play that every week. Good info. Thanks.

[rurallib]

2. In the (slightly bastardized) words of Everett Dirksen

"a trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you're talking real money".
Gee, coupled with the tax cuts for the rich ... we coulda done _____________ (fill in the blank)
in about a year and a half Bush will have doubled the debt he inherited. Unbelievable.
Andy Humm on Freespeech TV always says that the only reason Bush started this war was to bankrupt the country so he could totally cut social services.