Letters to the Editor
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miscalculated?
Obviously the real cost of the war is not monetary.. but shall we look at these numbers? First of all, I can't imagine the $3 trillion is the incremental cost of the war. And that $3 trillion.. that's $333 million a day for 9,000 days, or 25 years. We're going to be spending at current rate for two more decades?
Regarding size, we're also talking to the sun and back.. and I think this would pay for a year's healthcare for everyone on the planet, unless US kids doctor bills average $6,000/year.
But - keeping things in perspective.. interesting that this $3 trillion happens to be the amount the Bush administration increased our national debt during the last 7 years: from 6 to 9 trillion, or $20,000 to $30,000 per US citizen.
Easy to ask in retrospect.. but for those US citizens supporting war way back in 2002.. would a check for $10,000 per family member been helpful to calm those Saddam's-coming-to-get-me night tremors?
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Everyone who wants to quibble about numbers:
Click on my name first.
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If anything, Tom may have been um, conservative.
Click on my name for a link.
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Clearly..
..Tom Tomorrow hates Jews.
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Clearly...
You're imagining things.
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Wrong sales pitch
Americans don't want to hear who ELSE you COULD give that money to. They WOULD respond to you telling them you'll give it BACK to THEM.
Sure we could have built a flying city for all the children in Africa orphaned by AIDS too, but that wouldn't make me personally any better off.
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let's not forget the bright side in all this..
Let's say Bush had won his war in 100 days with $100 billion. He would have then been on his way to N Korea (oops. no oil), Iran, Russia. Canada. Whoever. Creating a complete mess at the onset saved money on logistics, and only 3/4 of the world hates us.
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quibbling about numbers..
Nimrod Gently,
I don't mean to put you in the position of managing a quibble.. I'm just using this forum to point out that the $10B/mo and $3T total don't measure the same thing. $10B only measures salaries, basically, and ignores veteran care completely (as I see from your note).
My seconds major point was about *incremental* cost. What would the US GDP have been in 1960 if WWII had never happened? Clearly less - and for a lot of the world, like Japan and Russia, the war had its benefits.
Vietnam and Korean war returned zero for our investment.. I can't imagine 1980 would have looked very different whether or not we had them. Wonder where we might have been in 2020 if this hadn't happened.
If only we had some sort of Glimpse from Tomorrow.. some sort of all-knowing beacon from the Beyond.. hmm.
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Fool me three trillion times . . .
Or, to put it yet another way, Tom Tomorrow could draw a strip about a different Dubya/republican lie every Sunday for the next 10,000 years.
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It has paid for itself - just not to us.
Ever watch Goldfinger? They were not stealing the gold in Fort Knox, they were going to nuke it and take i t out of circulation in order to drive the price of gold up, which Goldfinger and stockpiled in anticipation of the removal of of the Fort Knox Gold from pay.
Is Iraq oil in play?
What does that do to the price of oil?
Is Iraqi oil supposed to be in play?
Is is supposed to be kept off the market to keep oil prices high and oil company profits even higher.
You should be able to figure this out? Why can't you?
"Never give a sucker an even break." W. C. Fields
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@rupert_c
Is is supposed to be kept off the market to keep oil prices high and oil company profits even higher.
It depends on what the definition of "is is" is.
Otherwise, I tend to agree with you.
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(The headline for your letter posting)
I didn't mean a slight against anyone, I just wanted to draw people's attention to the author's notes.
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ooof
It'd be funny if I could laugh about it I guess, but the reality is I get an ache in the pit of my stomach when I start to think about the money involved. And Bees- there is no giving it BACK to us. We never had it. They're borrowing it on our behalf. So rather than taking our money, they're giving us debt - with interest. Very generous, no? That's the part I can't manage a laugh about. If they were just blowing our tax dollars, I think I'd be able to chuckle a bit.
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And the War Criminals Remain Charge of the USA!
And US citizens have STILL not impeached War Criminals GW Bush, Dick Cheney, and others; have not put them into jail where they should be. Now that is a crime, too, in my opinion.
--GSC
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for three trillion dollars
we could probably have caught bin Laden and destroyed al Qaida.
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Keep Hammering Away Tom - It's amazing how short memories are
Especially with the Reich Wing Republithugs doing there best to scramble up the truth.
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A Lost Cause
In my opinion any excuse for this war. Is just an excuse. When this war 1st started is was thought that it was just President Bush's way of finishing what his fathter had started. To remove that suspicion, they had made up another excuse in saying that this war was purely on terrroism(As if you can fight what you can't see. I mean if it was that easy, they would have gotten rid of all the gangs in the U.S by now.) Then when that got old and the people wanted a new reason for the prolonging of the war, there excuse was "We're running out of oil...the Afgans and Iraqis are withholding it from us".
So we spend trillions of dollars on a war we can't win. Its not like we're gonna make that money back. Well not true, they can always raise our taxes like they always do. I mean its not like the war is gonna pay for itself. How could it? I mean we just gave Palenstine a shit load of money and a bunch of our jet fighters(Which was a bad idea) and no one is gonna pay us back any of the money they owe us.
We could look and actually use other alternatives to fuel, but do you honestly think people will give up something as simple and expensive to use as oil. Of course not. Especially since the people are being backed by oil companies who will constanstly buy out and remove any new plans that are alternatives to fuel before the media gets word of it.
There are no pros to this war. We're in debt, half the world hates us and thousands of soldiers have just died in vain. Its time for us to pull out of this war and recover from our own near demise.