A Way Forward: Reexamining the Pentagon's Spending Habits

[unhappycamper]

A Way Forward: Reexamining the Pentagon's Spending Habits
by Frida Berrigan
Published on Saturday, July 10, 2010 by Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)

What is a trillion? It is a big number for sure. The best explanation I have found for this mind-blowing figure is from children's book author David Schwartz. "One million seconds comes out to be about 11½ days. A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years."

What is a trillion dollars? What can you get for that much money?

Rethink Afghanistan -- Robert Greenwald's effort to help us understand the war on terror, its costs, and consequences -- has a new Facebook application aimed at breaking down exactly how much we can get for one trillion dollars.

~snip~

During one round of the game, we were able to spend $999.5 billion to:

* Hire every worker in Afghanistan for one year at a total cost of $12 billion;
* Fund the cleanup of the Gulf oil spill (costs as of May 28th) at a total cost of $930 million;
* Build 4 million affordable housing units at a total cost of $516 billion;
* Provide health care for 4 million average people for one year at a total cost of $13.6 billion;
* Provide health care for 5 million children for one year at a total cost of $11.5 billion;
* Hire 5 million music/arts teachers for a year at a total cost of $292.5 billion:
* Fund Head Start places for three million children for one year at a total cost of $21.9 billion;
* Generate renewable energy for 1 million residences for one year at a total cost of $969.3 million;
* Hire 2 million elementary school teachers for one year at a total cost of $122.2 billion;
* Provide a one-year university scholarship for 1 million students at a total cost of $7.9 billion.

... And have $516.5 million left over (way more than enough to pay off my college loans).