Crazy pinko-commie alternatives for half a trillion dollars

So much for doing this on the cheap. By the end of the year, we will have spent a half a trillion dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan [1] (mostly Iraq). That’s a mighty big number and I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it. So I put together this little comparison:

• Total in integer form is $500,000,000,000.00 (man that’s a lot of zeros)
• It comprises 42.5% of the total U.S. GDP (yes, nearly half!)
• It is 38.5% of the global debt (enough for the U.S. to forgive all bilateral debt)
• Is enough to completely fund pre-war Iraq for nearly 6 years!
• Enough to fund 15% of entire U.S. power requirements (30 times more than ANWR projections)
• We could give $83 to every man, woman, and child on the planet (in many countries, people subsist on less than $1 per day).
• It is enough to produce 250,000,000,000 bushels of corn (enough to give every man, woman, and child 42 bushels of corn)
• We could have built 100,000 new schools (enough to build 500 nice, modern, full-sized schools in every single country in the world)
• Or for that matter, 500 modern hospitals (enough to give every country on Earth 2-3 new, modern, fully-equipped hospitals)
• Or why not just build 10,000,000 modern homes? (large enough to house 50,000,000 people comfortably)

If we would have done any one of these with the money instead, I very much doubt that bin Laden would find anyone willing to pick up a gun and shoot Americans. But then again, I’m just a nutty liberal.