$450,000,000,000

So I need to do some posting so that you can actually see the personality test results, and I thought another critique of the government would be in order. Earlier this week, or maybe even last week, the Senate approved the Defense Department's budget in a close close vote of 100-0 yea's to nehs. It was a razor thin victory for the Halliburton/McDonald-Douglass/Boing/Lockheed-Martin group, but thank goodness they won. Now to put this into perspective, I thought that I'd look up some figures on just what stuff costs and how that money can be spread around:


Using the data from the National Priorities Project:

Ok well first off and easy figure, there's something like 250,000,000 people in the US (a lil' more) which would mean that we could each get $2,000 back each. I don't know about you but that would be very nice chunk of change to get back, I mean talk about trickle down economics.

The average salary of a full-time high school teacher is $47,500 per year so that means that we could hire ~10,000,000 more teachers, or 1 teacher per 25 people in the US. Thats not per kid, tha's per person. Per kid it would be more like 1 teacher per 7 kids under 18. I think a more realistic idea would be to just increase the average pay for teacher, making the job more competitive and getting more qualified people for the job. Imagine what would happen if the average pay were up to $70,000 per teacher...

The total amount of money spent on education in the United States in 2004 was ~$750,000,000 so we could effectively increase eduction monies by 600x what it currently is or by 600,000%.

I'm not going to quote the numbers because its obvious that the ~3% of the population of the US that are hungry wouldn't have to be hungry anymore.

The amount of money spend on the afforable housing inniative in 2004 was just over $3 million, so that could be increased by 120,000x what it was in 2004.

Finally, the cost of the war in Iraq to date is ~$375,000,000,000.

I ask you where does the priorities of the people of the United States lie?