During one round of the game, we were able to spend $999.5 billion to:
* Hire every worker in Afghanistan for one year at a total cost of $12 billion;
* Fund the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill (costs as of May 28th) at a total cost of $930 million;
* Build 4 million affordable housing units at a total cost of $516 billion;
* Provide health care for 4 million average people for one year at a total cost of $13.6 billion;
* Provide health care for 5 million children for one year at a total cost of $11.5 billion;
* Hire 5 million music/arts teachers for a year at a total cost of $292.5 billion:
* Fund Head Start places for three million children for one year at a total cost of $21.9 billion;
* Generate renewable energy for 1 million residences for one year at a total cost of $969.3 million;
* Hire 2 million elementary school teachers for one year at a total cost of $122.2 billion;
* Provide a one-year university scholarship for 1 million students at a total cost of $7.9 billion.
... And have $516.5 million left over (way more than enough to pay off my college loans).
A trillion dollars is also what the United States has spent since 2001 on military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, it is being estimated that another $800 billion plus will be added to the tab before the wars are ended."
And that's just the add-on, off-the-books bit. The base military budget that Gates doesn't want to dip into for such trivialities as wars (together with military debt payments) makes up over half of the spending our income taxes go to, and it is destroying our economy. Even tax cuts are better for the economy than military spending, even here at home, and investment in other industries (education, energy, infrastructure) is even better -- in fact, necessary. We can have a war economy or a sustainable economy. We have to choose. It's way to late to be talking about beginning to do stupid things.
The geniuses who run the University of Virginia have decided that with the state cutting them off, the sensible thing is to hike tuition rates up to "the market rate", the same mumbo-jumbo excuse the university uses to pay its workers poverty wages. But there is no market rate for war, or for the nuclear power plants packaged into the same bill. Some things could never survive in a market. Had the Ludlow Amendment passed in 1938, and the public been given the right to vote wars up or down, we'd end wars. The U.S. public wants unemployment benefits extended and overwhelmingly views jobs as the top priority, not deficits -- and certainly not the pretense of deficit-concern-except-for-wars. When the Program on International Policy Attitudes showed Americans the federal budget and asked for changes, on average they said to cut 35% out of the military.
Try getting Americans to agree to the war escalation spending bill the House sent to the Senate on July 1st. Try showing them the lines buried in the bill in which the House requires itself to vote on any proposals passed by the Senate out of the President's Cat food Commission to cut Social Security. Try finding 30% of Americans to support a bill that destroys jobs and retirements to fund the escalation of a war we oppose.
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