http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/8/141431/6176/691/511871#c34 The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree Hotlist
by John Cusack
Thu May 08, 2008 at 11:44:05 AM PDT
THAT WAS FUN. Just got done spending $3 trillion. Try it yourself – it's a lot harder
than you might think. Honestly, it would have been a whole lot easier just to follow the President's example and blow it all on one illegal occupation of Iraq.
$3 trillion is the projected cost of the Iraq War according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes. That's a whole lot of zeroes, but what does it really amount to? How many homes would it buy for Americans who've fallen victim to the subprime meltdown? How many debts would it pay off for developing nations? For that matter, how many of those new Mac Air laptops would it buy me? As it turns out, one whole hell of a lot of all of those things combined.
What a colossal waste of money. What a tragedy of lost opportunities. Where is all this money going? KBR, Halliburton and the other war profiteers have made out like bandits in Iraq, while taxpayers and their own workers get screwed. KBR enjoys contracts worth $16 billion, and still avoids paying Medicare and Social Security taxes by hiring workers through shell companies in the Cayman Islands.
In the Bush Administration's defense, of course, they had no idea it would cost this much when they embarked on their insane crusade (in fact, they still don't) Along with cheering Iraqis, arsenals of WMDs, and leprechauns and unicorns, the White House expected to be presenting the American people with a much, much smaller bill for its services. Back in 2003, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld (remember him?) was fond of quoting the projected cost at $50 billion.
MORE at the link. And say hello!
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