What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT: What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy
By DAVID LEONHARDT
Published: January 17, 2007

The human mind isn’t very well equipped to make sense of a figure like $1.2 trillion. We don’t deal with a trillion of anything in our daily lives, and so when we come across such a big number, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big number. Millions, billions, a trillion — they all start to sound the same.

The way to come to grips with $1.2 trillion is to forget about the number itself and think instead about what you could buy with the money. When you do that, a trillion stops sounding anything like millions or billions.

For starters, $1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign — a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children’s lives.

Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn’t use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge increase in reconstruction funds.

The final big chunk of the money could go to national security. The recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that have not been put in place — better baggage and cargo screening, stronger measures against nuclear proliferation — could be enacted. Financing for the war in Afghanistan could be increased to beat back the Taliban’s recent gains, and a peacekeeping force could put a stop to the genocide in Darfur.

All that would be one way to spend $1.2 trillion. Here would be another:

The war in Iraq....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leonhardt.html?hp&ex=1169096400&en=7b447527f13af5dd&ei=5094&partner=homepage

[The Traveler]

1. Well, that sure does clarify things a bit

And Georgie boy wants to talk about spending the people's money wisely ...

[madeline_con]

2. "... preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child ..."

Are parents no longer expected to do anything?!

Let's just pick them up at the hospital and get started "educating" them early! :eyes:

[HappyWeasel]

3. Yeah, really....

But with 10 million public college students, paying on average 10,000 dollars a semester, we could use 1.2 Trillion dollars for free 4-year education for all students.

[bluewave]

4. Is it really up to $1.2 trillion?

I thought it was currently at around $600 billion.

[DeepModem Mom]

5. That's right -- in direct cost. Leonhardt has calculated "indirect costs."

From the article: "Linda Bilmes, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Clinton administration adviser, put a total price tag of more than $2 trillion on the war. They include a number of indirect costs, like the economic stimulus that the war funds would have provided if they had been spent in this country.

Mr. Wallsten, who worked with Katrina Kosec, another economist, argues for a figure closer to $1 trillion in today’s dollars. My own estimate falls on the conservative side, largely because it focuses on the actual money that Americans would have been able to spend in the absence of a war. I didn’t even attempt to put a monetary value on the more than 3,000 American deaths in the war."

[bluewave]

6. Ah, thanks

I assumed it was based on estimates. We could have done so much with that money.

[OneBlueSky]

7. 1.5 Hershey bars for every person on the planet . . . n/t

.

[Sherman A1]

8. Now you're talkin'