Gregory R. Weiher

"A billion here and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money." Everett McKinley Dirksen

Well, the Bush Administration certainly has mastered the art of “Shock and Awe”. If you thought it got the attention of hapless Iraqis with all those cluster bombs and depleted uranium munitions, how about the double-take the Congress did when Bush said he needed another $87 billion? “Boo-yah!” as they say.

Eighty-seven billion is quite a few bucks! That’s even enough to impress the high-rollers like Halliburton, Bechtel, or the Carlyle Group. When you’re talking about money like that, a few hundred million here and there sounds downright paltry.

Let’s pick a number – say, $600 million. Six hundred million dollars is only seven tenths of one percent of $87 billion. In the overall scheme of Bush’s supplemental budget request, $600 million is rounding error.

Just coincidentally, $600 million is what David Kay says he needs to really do a bang-up job searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Admittedly, $600 million is not much, but let’s see what you might be able to buy with it, just hypothetically speaking, if you didn’t spend it to find the WsMD (pronounced dubyas emm dee) that we all know are in Iraq someplace.

I just happened to be browsing through the Statistical Abstract of the United States, 2002 the other day. I happened on Table No. 430, “State Governments – Expenditures and Debt by State, 2000”. It turns out that you could actually buy some stuff with $600 million.

For instance, any one of eight states could finance a whole year of education expenditures with $600 million. Some of them would have $100 million or so to spare, and one could get two years worth of education funding with about $75 million left over – and they could provide state police protection for about four years with that.

Any one of five states would have enough to fund its whole public welfare budget. In thirteen different states, $600 million would pay for a whole year’s worth of highway construction, and in most of those they would be building more miles of highways than they’d ever been able to build in a year before.

There are twenty-one states where $600 million would replace the entire nut for health and hospitals. In Alaska, $600 million would provide state health and hospital funds for five years, and for over seven years in Wyoming.

In every state in the union except California and Pennsylvania, $600 million exceeds the annual budget for police protection. In fact, $600 million exceeds the collective annual budgets for police protection for sixteen of the states with four million to spare.

Thirty-three states spend less than $600 million a year each for prisons. Forty-six states spend less than $600 million a year managing natural resources. No state spends as much as $600 million a year for parks and recreation. Thirty-three states spend less than $600 million a year on governmental administration.

Of course, there are some who say these examples are given a sort of poignancy by the fact that so many of the states are in bad financial shape right now. They’ve cut back on their education programs, employment, indigent health spending, yatta, yatta, yatta. But what could be more important than finding those WsMD in Iraq? Giving up a year’s worth of education funding in Maine, or Montana, or New Hampshire, or North Dakota, or Rhode Island, or South Dakota, or Vermont, or Wyoming is a small price to pay, I say. They’re all pretty much piss-ant states anyway.

You see, we’ve heard this kind of whining from the states before. States that are really serious about getting some new federal money should cut the po’ mouth and show a little ingenuity.

Here’s what I’d suggest. First, get in touch with the chamber of commerce in Syria or Iran and see if you can rent some honest-to-God Muslims. This will work better if you can get them to wear burkas or djellabas or whatever they wear over there. If you can get them to bring along a few camels and a couple of tents, so much the better!

Next, find a kind of arid, uninhabited stretch of your state’s geography. Then have all of these folks congregate in said same barren area. Have them park a few semi-trailers nearby (mobile weapons labs, doncha know), and sport a few AK-47s.

Now you’re just about all the way home. Bring this congregation of malcontents to the attention of somebody in the Bush Administration. I wouldn’t waste my time with George himself – go directly to somebody with decision-making power. I would suggest Dick Cheney, or, even better, Richard Perle. Mention that you think they may be developing weapons of mass destruction. If you can conjure up a document about them purchasing radioactive waste from Nevada, those neo-con boys will be eating out of your hand. (If you can’t come up with a convincing document, I know a guy at our neighborhood Kinko’s who can help you.) Then, when you’ve got their attention, use the phrase “global war against terrorism.”

If you don’t get $600 million faster than you can say Condoleezza Rice, I’ ll kiss you where the sun don’t shine. If you still have any doubts, remember -- $600 million is chump change to these guys, especially when homeland security hangs in the balance.