14.5 million free rides for a year at Harvard

[unsoccer-mom]

<p>Here is an interesting comparison from the Boston Globe website on what else one could have bought with the $456 billion spent on the war in Iraq. </p>

<p>Some of the items are listed below:</p>

<p>–Free gas for everybody in the U.S. for 1.2 years</p>

<p>–With just one-sixth of the US money targeted for the Iraq war, you could convert all cars in America to run on ethanol. </p>

<p>–At published rates for next year, $456 billion translates into 14.5 million free rides for a year at Harvard</p>

<p>–$456 billion invested in Iraq could have fed and educated the world’s poor for five and a half years.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/nation/gallery/050207_TheCostofWar/[/url]”>http://www.boston.com/news/nation/gallery/050207_TheCostofWar/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[interesteddad]

<p>Clearly the Boston Globe does not “support our troops”!</p>

[renix]

<p>I hope you’re joking.</p>

[Princedog]

<p>An excerpt from a speech given by President Eisenhower in April of 1953:</p>

<p>

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. </p>

<p>This world in arms is not spending money alone. </p>

<p>It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. </p>

<p>The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. </p>

<p>It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. </p>

<p>It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. </p>

<p>It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. </p>

<p>We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. </p>

<p>We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. </p>

<p>This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. </p>

<p>This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

</p>

<p>Eloquent, but then again it really just shows that we’ve always allocated a great deal of the national budget to defense. Big stick policies have been the norm since the Roosevelt corollary and the US becoming, so to speak, the defender of the free world. Even if we weren’t at war, a fair chunk of that money would have still gone to maintaining a large standing military. Right now, for as much money going into Iraq, there are still soliders without the proper equipment, putting them at more risk. We could stand to spend a little more. In the specter of Vietnam, I do not suspect that the American public will continue to allow a war in their names indefinitely; my sense is that we are almost biding time at this point. I wish it was different, and I think it COULD have been different. I find the politics of war very hazy, and I find it difficult not to say that some of it is politically advantageous.</p>