What Would You Do With $300,000,000,000?

Estimates from costofwar.com put the cost of the Iraq war at close to $300 Billion Dollars. This got me to thinking about all of the other things we could use this money for. So, I did a little digging and this is what I came up with.

Across the world thousands have been displaced or left homeless due to the inordinate amount of natural disasters of late. Hundreds of thousands are estimated to be homeless/displaced from the recent quake in Indonesia. These are the same people who are still trying to pick up the pieces after the tsunami in 2004 which killed over 100,000 and left countless without food, clean water or shelter.

Right here in our own country thousands faced similar peril last year when Katrina hit. There already existed hundreds of thousands of homeless and hungry in the United States. We do not have to go beyond our borders to seek those who need assistance. You can find them in every city of every state in the country. Feedthechildren.org estimates there are millions of children in the US that go to bed hungry EVERY NIGHT. It really shouldn't be that way. The same organization offers a program that will feed a child for $7 a month. That buys 50 pounds of food and delivers it to a hungry kid. So, for 84 bucks a year one child never has to go hungry. With $300,000,0000,000 we could ensure that 3,571,428,571 children got fed for an entire year.

If you want to apply the same logic internationally it costs $8/month. That's 3,125,000,000 kids WORLDWIDE not going hungry for a year.

The website babycenter.com has a page where you can estimate the cost of raising a child from birth to age 18. If I were to give birth this year, in the area I live in, it would cost me approximately $226,000 to raise my kid until he/she was ready to go to college. That works out to roughly $12,555 per year. Translation? 23,887,252 children could receive housing, clothing, healthcare, food and education for a full year. That also means for the bargain price of $293,800,000,000 we could raise 1.3 MILLION kids for 18 YEARS.

I also estimated we could provide healthcare for 300,000,000 kids for a year. Keep in mind the population for the entire United States is almost that very same figure.

Another thing to ponder is the horrid state of the educational systems in the United States and how teachers are not compensated properly for all they do. These are the people we entrust the minds of our children to and yet, according to AFT.org (American Federation of Teachers), the average starting salary (in my state of NC) is a measly $27,272. I'm sure with $300 billion we could surely give them a raise. Or perhaps hire another 10,880,603 teachers to help out the ones we already have?

Another plague that our society is facing is cancer. I believe that the money we've spent on Iraq could be quite useful in finding a cure or even treatment. Cancer.org's webpage says the average cost of a mammogram runs between $50-150. Imagine how grateful those 200,000,0000 women would be to receive a much needed preventative tool?

And thanks to the US Census Bureau I have figured out that we could just have given $1000 bucks to each person in the US or $45 to every person in the world.

Of course, these monetary figures do not account for the cost of human life or the cost of our country's credibility. Those numbers are far higher I'm sure. Of course that is, if they could be measured.