A Memorial Day Tribute to One Trillion Wasted Dollars

This May 30th we will reach another dubious milestone in our almost nine years of war. At that precise moment, we will have spent $1 trillion in operational costs for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tracked by the National Priorities Project’s cost of war counter.

What is $1 trillion worth? NPP explains it this way: if you made a million dollars a year, it would take you a million years to earn $1 trillion.

It’s a shame that we have wasted that $1 trillion on war, rather than on a WPA-style program to repair our roads and bridges that could have hired those 15.3 million people out of work for $50,000 apiece. And on top of that, we would still have had a cool $235 billion left over to invest in clean energy, producing 3.9 million green jobs while reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, according to a study by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Or with that $1 trillion we could have given 4-year scholarships at state universities to the 2 million freshmen currently enrolled – and do the same thing again in each of the next 23 years. Or we could have provided the estimated 500,000 homeless families across the U.S. with affordable housing – and done that each year for the next 17 years.

In other words, $1 trillion has the potential to completely wipe out major domestic social problems that desperately need funding as we cope with the effects of the great recession.

And on this Memorial Day weekend, there is no way to quantify the tragedy of the lost lives of the U.S. soldiers and countless Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Each dollar spent on the wars not only was diverted from peaceful, productive projects, but also contributed to these lives lost. That is the greatest tragedy of all.

Huffington Post