The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree

2008-04-25T16:43:19Z

Whew! 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. Try it yourself:

http://3trillion.org/

What a colossal waste of money. What a tragedy of lost opportunities.

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.

$50 billion? That’s chump change. You could barely afford a science thing for that. Proportionally, the difference between $50 billion and $3 trillion is the difference between $50 and $3,000. Try buying a Hannah Montana ticket for fifty bucks.

You may recall that about six years ago, Bush’s own chief economic adviser, Lawrence Linsdey, was pushed out of the White House for suggesting that the war could cost up to a trifling $200 billion – still $2.8 trillion off the mark. “Baloney” was how Rumsfeld characterized Lindsey’s estimate, before quoting the $50 billion figure.

With Rumsfeld gone, one would hope to see a little more honest accounting out of the Defense Department. So what does The Pentagon have to say about Stiglitz’s sobering calculation? That number "seems way out of the ballpark to me," said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell.

Could $3 trillion cover the cost of a worthwhile accountant at the DoD? Apparently that’s the only thing it can’t afford.

$3 Trillion Shopping Spree at Brave New Films

The $3 Trillion Shopping Spree