LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY deconcentrate)

I was trawling BeliefNet via the linkbar, and I came across this sobering article linked through David Kuo's weblog, about the costs of the "war" in Iraq.

Let's accept the article's conservative average. The war has cost America at least $1 trillion. The amount of money that must be is so large that frankly, I can't begin to picture that kind of money in physical, tangible existence anywhere. This is a ghost figure that has no realistic weight - but it has an effect, and it has cost. The article in question attempts to quantify that cost, and what the effects of the loss of that sum to war expenditures might mean.

There are many comparisons that might be made [...] the value of one EPA, the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century's worth of EPA spending (in today's dollars), almost 130 EPAs [...] the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs [...] [since] the annual budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute are $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, the $1 trillion war cost is equivalent to 170 NSFs and 200 NCIs.
[...]
The cost of the war can also be expressed as approximately 28 HS's, where HS, the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, is about $35 billion [...] the annual budget of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration [...] is approximately $670 million, or about two-thirds of $1 billion. The Iraq War has cost about 1,500 NHTSA's.
[...]
The Treasury could have used the money to mail a check for more than $3,000 to every man, woman and child in the United States [...] the Treasury could have sent a check for more than $150 to every human being on earth. The lives of millions of children, who die from nothing more serious than measles, tetanus, respiratory infections and diarrhea, could be saved, since these illnesses can be prevented by $2 vaccines, $1 worth of antibiotics, or a 10-cent dose of oral rehydration salts as well as the main but still very far from prohibitive cost of people to administer the programs [...] it would take almost three decades to spend a trillion dollars at $1,000 per second, and if spending at this rate occurred only during business hours, more than 120 years would be required to dispense the sum.
[...]
A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.

I'll briefly summarize the more impressive numbers: It takes 32,000 years for a trillion seconds to pass. A trillion dollars could pay every man, woman and child in America roughly $3,000, could cover vaccines and antibiotics for starving, dying children. Could buy them food, shelter, warmth. A trillion dollars could have brought us God knows how many new treatments for cancer - maybe even a cure.

A trillion dollars. That trillion could have been spent saving lives, could have been spent out of love. Instead, it was spent taking lives for the sake of war.

David takes some small solace in knowing that this money never would have gotten to these causes in the first place, even without the war.

I don't.

$1 trillion. A number I can't even begin to conceive of owning, much less spending. In the hands of a President and a Congress that supposedly pays more respect to the Christian faith than any other. And the government used it to murder people. Regardless of one's feelings on the death penalty and on the innocence of a terrorist of any stripe, that money supported a war that killed Iraqi civilians whose only crime happened to be getting caught in the crossfire.

Every so often I hear things that, as a Christian, break my heart and fill me with disgust at the horrible damages Dominionist thinking inflicts on people of all faiths, but rarely if ever are those damages as explicitly illuminated as they are here.