When all is said and done, the Iraq war will cost America $3 trillion dollars. That’s a figure that’s difficult to fully comprehend, and some may wonder how it was calculated. The Washington Post broke it down:
Some people will scoff at that number, but we’ve done the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate “baloney.” Administration officials insisted that the costs would be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said on “Nightline” that reconstructing Iraq would cost the American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, hoped that U.S. partners would chip in, as they had in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq’s oil would pay for the damages.
The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after Vietnam), it is also the second most costly — surpassed only by World War II.
Why doesn’t the public understand the staggering scale of our expenditures? In part because the administration talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is apparently still an emergency five years after the war began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now running at $12 billion a month — $16 billion if you include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.
Have you ever thought about how much $3 trillion dollars really is? Like, in terms of what else you could buy with that money? Well, 3trillion.org has, and they’ve created an awesome website where you can add hundreds of items to your shopping cart and still not even come close to spending that much.
The concept is simple: you browse their website for items to add to your cart. They can be as large in scale as wind turbines to power all of the United States ($1,000,000,000,000.00), or as small as a copy of the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ DVD ($10.00). You can even buy yourself a boob job, the New York Yankees, a custom rollercoaster or launch your ashes into space. The possibilities are endless, and if you don’t see something you want, you can add it.
It’s seriously very hard to spend $3 trillion. I still didn’t end up making it all the way; after over an hour on the site my grand total was $2,885,172,839,274.00 for all of the following:
- Universal Health Care for Every American
- Fight AIDS in developing nations
- Search for a cure to cancer
- Switch to solar power (all of America)
- Fund research for alternatives to oil
- National rapid transit system
- Clean up pollution (in major cities)
- Achieve universal literacy
- End hunger and poverty related diseases
- Increase sustainable organic produce in the US
- Finish repairing the damage done by Hurricane Katrina
- Cure a deadly disease
- Sustainable agriculture education, worldwide
- Non-violent leadership training (1 year) for 10 million leaders
- Food, shelter & vet care for unwanted pets
- End animal testing
- K-12 arts and music education
- New clothing, shoes, coats and schools supplies for 10 million children
- Build 100 new schools
- Pay 1,000 teachers’ salaries
- Give all firefighters a raise
- Plant 1,000,000 trees
- National Park Service Annual Budget
- Help rebuild Iraq
- Send Bush to Mars (1 way ticket)
After all that do-good spending, I still had over three billion dollars left over for things like homes for myself and all of my friends and family, organic vegetarian groceries for a year, home brewery equipment, a hammock and the Essential Leonard Cohen CD. You know, after expending so much energy on helping the world, you really want to kick back and relax a little.
It’s staggering to realize how much could have been achieved with that money. Instead of putting it to use actually doing all of the things that we dream about doing to make the world a better place, that money is funding pointless carnage and destruction. The Bush administration wants us to believe that this money was well spent, but we should know otherwise.
Maybe putting a price tag on the steaming bag of shit we’ve been sold as a nation will help people wake up and realize how much this war is affecting the world. If over 1 million dead Iraqis and 4,000 dead Americans isn’t enough for you – not to mention the destabilization of an entire region – perhaps what Americans really need to come to grips with the reality of this situation is to see how that money could have solved all of their complaints. Snowed under by hospital bills? We could have a whole new system in place by now! Nervously living in a region where a natural disaster could easily wipe out your entire community? You could have levees, shelters and emergency backup plans galore!
So please, everyone, buy away. Send $3 trillion gift certificates to everyone you know via the 3trillion.org website and urge them to fantasy-shop to their hearts’ content. The point isn’t gluttony and greed, though by all means have fun shopping: the point is awareness. We as a nation are letting our government get away with this. The power of the people is stronger than we realize, whether it’s put in motion through protests, boycotts, the purchasing decisions we make or simply exercising our rights as citizens of a democratic nation to vote accordingly.
Link [3trillion] + [Washington Post]
Photo Credits: Flickr user FredoAlvarez, Wikimedia Commons + Wikimedia Commons
