"The war in Iraq will ultimately cost US taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy...both men (Chuck Schumer and Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. 'For a fraction of the cost of this war,'said Mr. Stiglitz, 'we could have put Social Security on sound footing for the nest half-century or more." (He) cited that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers."
SHAME ON YOU MR. BUSH!!!!!
Here is digging into the numbers a bit more, on nationalpriorities.org. This takes into consideration ONLY NYC's 17.5$ billion contribution to this disaster war, and the trade off, or opportunity costs of this nightmare:
3,219,103 People with Health Care OR
32,680,969 Homes with Renewable Electricity OR 336,904 Public Safety Officers OR 265,842 Music and Arts Teachers OR 2,848,538 Scholarships for University Students OR 919 New Elementary Schools OR 99,228 Affordable Housing Units OR 6,099,879 Children with Health Care OR 1,988,816 Head Start Places for Children OR 202,181 Elementary School Teachers OR 262,346 Port Container InspectorsNumbers tend to be vague and abstract, especially when the numbers are so unrealistically high. But when seen in the context of what we have had to sacrifice, what a condition our country is is, what kind of difference this money could have done in eradicating malaria or river blindness or providing antiretroviral drugs to dying AIDS patients in South Africa, it is appalling.
IMPEACH BUSH!!!!!
