Spin Dry

That's how much the Iraq War has cost -- in money, not lives -- so far. That's three hundred billion, with a "b". Three hundred billion. Hm. Let's see what three hundred billion can buy when it's not being used for death, destruction and oil-stealing:

• 6.6 billion college text books -- enough for half the population of the US for an entire four year degree program.


• 4.2 billion tanks of gas (at LA prices) for SUVs -- enough for over seven hundred drives around the planet.


• Flu shots for everyone on the planet, and plenty left over.


• Theatre tickets to send every man, woman and child in the US to see a Broadway show a month for a year.


• Laptops for every US resident -- although volume discounts on the deal would probably allow us to give them to every Canadian, too.


• Five million dollar grants to 60,000 schools


• Fifty thousand dollar scholarships to six million students


• A year's groceries for 38 million poor families


• One year of AIDS meds for almost 19 million people -- which works out to 20 years' worth of medication for every American with AIDS


• Twenty million new cars for the working poor to be able to get to work


• Enough to pay 8,570 other CEOs what Dick Cheney got from Halliburton


• Enough to pay Cheney's current salary to 1,510,573 other people


• Enough to buy Top-Ramen for everyone on the planet, for every meal, for forty-six years


• Enough to take everyone on the planet out to dinner at a really, really nice four-star restaurant


• Enough to buy a median priced home in LA county for 666,667 families


• Enough to buy Habitat for Humanity housing for 4.2 million poor families


• Enough to pay Tom Hanks's salary for his next 15,000 movies -- or to pay 15,000 extras Tom Hanks's salary for one movie


• Five years of daycare for 6.1 million working families with children


• One misadventure in the Middle East, begun on false pretenses and carried out for shifting motives, with no end in sight and no end result, except for an increase in the number of radicalized Muslims and likely terrorist recruits in the area.

For everything else, there's Mastercard...

Incidentally, a stack of 300 billion dollar bills would be over 20,000 miles high. A stack of that many quarters would reach the moon and make it a third of the way back. (That much money in quarters would reach from the Earth to the moon five times, plus nearly half a trip again, and put those quarters end-to-end, they'd stretch most of the way between Earth and Venus.)

If you'd like these mind-boggling numbers in terms of time and not money, they've done the work at What Really Happened already:

• A billion seconds ago, it was 1959.


• A billion minutes ago, Jesus was alive.


• A billion hours ago, our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.


• A billion dollars ago was only 8 hours and 20 minutes, at the rate Washington spends it.

And it's YOUR money.

Yes, your money. Every single one of you paid $1,200 to this loonatic effort that has accomplished nothing but the deaths of over 1,500 Americans, the permanent injury of tens of thousands more; the deaths and injuries of unknown hundreds of thousands of Iraqis; chaos, destabilization and possible civil war in Iraq; renewed coziness between Russia and Iran.

Three hundred billion dollars. Enough to give $192,061,460 to the families of every single one of the 1,562 American soldiers killed for nothing. The same dead soldiers for whom the government somehow couldn't come up with the $600 or so each (less than a million bucks total) to give them full body armor.

You did pay your taxes last week. Didn't you?