I read last week that Congress has approved a total of $507 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan wars and that our current “burn rate” is $8 billion per month. What does this really mean?
I did some math — on the basis of 300 million Americans — which is the most generous possible way to do this calculation, as we’ve not quite reached that and it includes a LOT of kids and elderly who can’t (and didn’t) pay anything for these wars.
Appropriations to date: $1,700 for every man, woman and child in America. Currently burning at $27 per person, per month. I wish I had a households number, or total employment number, to do this calculation, but I couldn’t find one. Still, I’m sure I’d get a lot more value out of a cell phone contract than all this military spending.
And… if you think these numbers seem low, when viewed per person, per month, consider this weekend’s report from PwC that for twice that, $1 trillion, we could cap global emissions of all greenhouse gases. Gasp. Cough. Cough.
Amen, my friend.
For the price to be paid for the Iraq war, the US government could have single-handedly subsidized this global emissions cap and established global leadership in everything from wind turbines to photovoltaics to hydrogen fuel cells.
And it would not have required any special effort because all this could be funded with the US dollars being voluntarily returned to us by our trading partners to strengthen the dollar and drive their export-led economies. The dollars are just rolling in–$400B…$500B…$600B–as the flip-side of our current account deficit. We’ve already spent them on all sorts of crap we don’t really need and the recipients in China, Japan, and elsewhere are literally giving them back to us with the expectaion of losing money after adjusting for the falling dollar. They don’t even want a positive return on their investment.
Why not take this gift and fund the development of an entirely new capital base on which we can build a more ecologically sustainable economy? But that would be too visionary. Instead we get an Iraq war and a series of unsustainable asset price bubbles at home and abroad… excess capacity to produce a whole lot more of what we don’t need and very little capacity to produce what we really do need.
But at least we’re a whole lot safer here at home. 😉