Epistemic Ingemination

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Sun, 18 Jul 2004

Your tax dollars at work

There is an excellent article entitled "The Price of Imperial Folly" by Phyllis Bennis over at Alternet.

I'll let it speak for itself:

The recently released Senate Intelligence Report demonstrates what so many have known for so long: The claimed justifications for the invasion of Iraq were based on lies. But lost in the Beltway debate over intelligence failure is the enormous price we Americans, Iraqis, the world are paying for the Bush administration's self-serving war.

In sheer dollar amounts, the costs of this precipitate war are already far higher than any number put forward by Bush officials at the outset of the war. The price tag so far is $151 billion and climbing already three times the initial estimate provided by Bush's Office of Management and Budget and embarrassingly close to the "$100 to $200 billion" that White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay anticipated just before he precipitously left the administration in December 2002.

For most of us, $151 billion is an incomprehensible amount of money. It's hard to imagine what that kind of dollar amount actually means. Well, here are some facts to prod our imagination.

To begin with, $151 billion can pay for health care for 23 million uninsured Americans; or housing stipends for 27 million homeless people in this country; or a year's salary for 3 million new elementary school teachers; or more than 678,000 new fire engines.

The international impact of that kind of money is even more breathtaking. That same $151 billion could feed half the hungry people in the world for two years and provide clean water and sanitation for the entire developing world and fund a comprehensive global AIDS program and pay for childhood immunizations for every child in poor countries that constitute the global South.

There's much more...

Posted at 08:38 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink] [Reload all] [E-mail]