{"id":1979,"date":"2007-01-18T16:48:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-18T22:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/?p=1979"},"modified":"2013-06-11T07:30:59","modified_gmt":"2013-06-11T13:30:59","slug":"war-in-iraq-12-trillion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/war-in-iraq-12-trillion\/","title":{"rendered":"War in Iraq – $1.2 TRILLION"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yup, you read it right. It was announced this week that the war in Iraq has cost the U.S. taxpayers $1.2 T<\/span>rillion a year.<\/p>\n

According to the Pentagon before the war began, the estimated cost for the war was in the neighborhood of $50 billion.<\/p>\n

David Leonhardt<\/A> writes in the International Herald Tribune that Democratic staff members in Congress largely agreed with the estimate. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, was a bit more realistic, predicting that the cost could go as high as $200 billion, but President George W. Bush fired him in part for saying so.<\/p>\n

To put it into perspective, it would be like getting a $500 estimate for car repairs and then getting a bill for $120,000.<\/p>\n

But what is $1.2 Trillion? Let’s write it out: $1,200,000,000,000 or 10 to the 12th power. That’s 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point. A trillion is a million million dollars.<\/p>\n

One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun<\/A>. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion dollar bills.<\/p>\n

Click here to see another visual image.<\/A><\/p>\n

Here’s another thought, let’s count to a billion. But first, let’s see how long that will take. I can count pretty fast for a while. I mumble a little, like “sev-sen” for “seventy-seven.” After a while (in the 100,000’s), it takes me a lot longer than a second for each number. If it takes me a second for each number (which is a little unrealistic), then it would take me about 24 hours to count to 86,400. I can count to a million in less than half a month. It will take me more than 30 years to count to a billion (not a trillion mind you).<\/p>\n

At a minimum wage of $5.75, $1.2 trillion would pay the salaries of 100,334,448 Americans for a year.<\/p>\n

The National Cancer Institutes budget is $6 billion a year. $1.2 trillion would pay that budget for the next 200 years.<\/p>\n

On today’s market a barrel of oil (42 U.S. gallons) costs $52. Not bad but think of all the oil you could purchase with $1.2 trillion – more than 23,076,923,076.<\/p>\n

It’s estimated <\/span>that the U.S. consumes roughly 20 million barrels a day. So with that knowledge, $1.2 trillion would purchase enough oil for the U.S. to survive on for 1,153 days or 3 years at the current rate of consumption.<\/p>\n

According to David Leonhardt, universal preschool would probably cost $50 billion a year. So would a treatment program for heart disease and diabetes.<\/p>\n

So that estimated $20 million for 20,000 additional troops in Iraq doesn’t sound that bad now does it? How much is your protection worth?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yup, you read it right. It was announced this week that the war in Iraq has cost the U.S. taxpayers $1.2 Trillion a year. According to the Pentagon before the war began, the estimated cost for the war was in the neighborhood of $50 billion. David Leonhardt writes in the International Herald Tribune that Democratic … Continue reading War in Iraq – $1.2 TRILLION<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[3015,257,3014,1018],"class_list":["post-1979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-1-2-trillion","tag-iraq","tag-pentagon","tag-war"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pEnSo-vV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/84"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1979"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10772,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1979\/revisions\/10772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/casadeblundell.com\/jonathan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}