The new supplemental bill is about $81 billion, which when you add that to the previously approved $228 billion ... ugh, can do the math, but I don't want to think about it. Of course Larry Summers was pushed out of his White House job for daring to say it would cost $200 billion. Wolfowitz and Natsios said the US wouldn't have to pay for reconstuction at all. Right. Maybe in a dream world where the president behaves like his father and fosters ties with other countries and builds alliances that include commitments to pay for joint action ... but that was never in the cards with this presidency (much like the notion that Iraqi oil would pay for it all should have always been considered a fantasy). And of course there is no sign that the insurgency will be ending any time soon, and when even the Iraqis who want to work through the system we put in place are taking 3 months to form a government ... ugh, there goes my head again. The costs mount and mount. And when you consider the things that money could have been used for, the lives that could have otherwise been bettered with those funds - all those diasbled people in need of services, the kids who don't get scholarships, the people who can't afford health insurance, the possibility of providing better health insurance coverage, of maintaining the country's natural wonders, fixing lousy schools, hiring more language specialists to protect us from future terrorist attacks, helping to put the arts back in education - the list of what could be done with over $309 billion is an incredibly long list. The costs go far deeper than most of us want to think about - and that's before we even get into the direct human costs.
Posted by armand at April 24, 2005 11:27 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics