Thursday, June 21, 2007

$456 Billion for Iraq War, more on the way

The National Priorities Project breaks down how the billions for an illegal war in Iraq could have made the US a better place to live:


  • 5.7 million people could have received health care coverage each year since the war began; and
  • 1 million affordable housing units could have been built; and
  • 430,000 school teachers could have been hired since the war began; and
  • 4.7 million students could have received tuition and fees for four years at a state university.

Readers can also go to the NPP website and get a break down on spending for each state and locality.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Joel has done an important service by posting this material. By comparsion, the spending for the Vietnam War, a much bigger war that took millions of Indo-
Chinese lives, has been estimated(from my readings) at around $150 billion from the 1965 escalation to its the 1975 complete withdrawalEven factoring in the huge inflation of the last 32 years, which probably makes the 150 billion somewhat greater than the 456 billion in real dollars,the latter statistics are for four years only.
We should remember the "peace dividend" that was promised when the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, thus eliminating in principle the cold war basis for massive military spending. The only "dividend' from the end of "end of the cold war" has gone to the military industrial complex contactors who profitted from it originally, and the only way to end that is to bring to power a government that will end the military industrial complex
Norman Markowitz