The Costs of Bush's Folly

Just to keep my outrage level up (none of this Skippy the Bush Kangaroo outrage fatigue for me, no sir! ;-)), I visit costofwar.com from the National Priorities Project to see if I could put the $ involved into numbers that I can wrap my head around. As of the time I visited the site, the total cost of Bush's Folly was $404,636,964,425, that is more than 9 years gross income for Microsoft, for example. To put it in terms that most of us can relate to I came up with these figures at the Cost of War site:

• we could have hired 7,012,407 additional public school teachers for one year.
• or we could have provided health insurance for 242,297,671 children for one year.
• or we could have built 3,643,378 additional housing units.
• or we could have provided 19,615,924 students four-year scholarships at public universities.
• or we could have paid for 53,594,362 children to attend a year of Head Start.

This puts the crimes of Bush & Co. in a light that is simple to understand. Too bad that the mainstream media sees fit to generally ignore it.

All of the above begs the following question. What, exactly, have we gotten in return? What makes giving up all of the potential worth it? If there is an answer other than, "nothing" to either of the above questions, I haven't come up with it yet.

R.