all you need is $440 billion and a dream

The White House plans to ask Congress for an additional $120 Billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total post-9/11 expenditure for military operations in those countries to $440 billion. (Yeah, with a B.) That’s the equivalent of $1,500 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. What could you do with an extra $1,500? What could our country do with an extra 440,000,000 large?

The PRI program The World ran a piece that puts it in some perspective. With $440 billion, you could acquire Bill Gates—nine times over. You could buy the Yankees and the Red Sox, the Dodgers and the Giants, the Steelers and the Seahawks. . . and Nike Corporation. . . and the Principality of Monaco. . . and you wouldn’t have spent half.

But the PRI piece doesn’t attempt to quantify what $170 million a day could buy in terms of health care for our citizens, or in numbers of primary school classrooms—complete with well paid teachers—or in tuition aid for the college bound. Or what could it get us in terms of real homeland security? Port safety, urban infrastructure, airline cargo screening? How about Head Start, AFDC, unemployment insurance, and job training? The list goes on and on, and what’s even more horrifying is that you wouldn’t have to choose just one of the things on the list. With $440 billion, you could have many of them—and isn’t it about time this country had its own principality!

Of course, there are some things that money can’t buy. . . .