What Would You Do With $18,000?
You could buy :
An A2003 Chevy Silverado K1500
A refurbished veterinary storage building
David Boyd’s Children Flying Kites
10 kilos of maize meal in Zimbabwe
1,800 troy oz of gold
House rental for a month on the Golden Mile in St Petersburg
A small residential plot in British Columbia
A week’s timeshare in the Cayman Islands
Your very own Nascar
You could even :
Fund a recovery plan for the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat
Treat a schizophrenic for a year
Sponsor a pro-cyclist in the RAAM road race
Give an Australian shepherd dog a new kidney
Train 8 basic-skills computer trainers for a week
Why do I ask, you wonder?
Because $18,000 per Iraqi citizen is what the Iraq war has cost so far. Steve Clemons has the figures:
[…]
The costs of America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq have tied up a staggering amount of resources that could have otherwise been deployed to great and necessary purposes elsewhere — at home and abroad.
I am not going to include in this brief comment the tragic human costs of those killed and injured on all sides of this debacle — but I’m just going to outline the Congressional Budget Office cost estimates of costs related to Iraq and the “war on terror” released today.
The figure — according to the CBO — is a whopping $432 billion.
To put that in perspective, this is $18,000 per person in Iraq. If computing just working age Iraqis, the per capita amount of these costs is $30,857.
The CIA fact book lists the purchasing power parity per capita GDP in Iraq as $3400. However, anyone with any genuine experience on the ground experience knows that the real income of families is much lower with individuals fortunate to earn something between $1500 and $2000 a year.
[…]
I expect most Iraqi citizens would rather that their portion had gone on the wombats than on destroying their country, or better still, into their bank accounts. No doubt it would’ve been used a lot more sensibly and creatively had that happened.
