As of May 30, in addition to the 1000th American GI casualty, the National Priorities Project calculates that we have past the one trillion dollar mark on the invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. One TRILLION dollars, with a T. It's a hard number to wrap your mind around, as this Google Sketchup illustration demonstrates. It also begs the question: just what have we bought for all that money and what good could have been done with that money instead?
Brave New Films's ReThink Afghanistan has a new Facebook app that allows you to see other ways that money could have been spent:
You could choose to hire every worker in Afghanistan for a year for
$12 billion or hire 1 million public safety workers for a year for $46.5 billion, and still only have made mere drops in the bucket.
Personally, I opted to pay for four years of college for a million students, fund the clean up of the gulf oil spill, hire one million elementary school teachers and offer health care for 10 million Americans and guess what? I still didn't reach that one trillion mark.
Check out the app. Tell us how you'd spend the money. Then consider sending this to your congresscritter to ask him/her how much more blood and treasure need to be lost in the sands of the Middle East.
