The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together in a conservative single-week estimate comes to $3.5 billion. Remember, that's PER WEEK!

By contrast, per YEAR:  Washington spends a total of just $7 billion per year on combating global warming. (Or a whopping two weeks' worth of war costs.)

 -William D. Hartun, director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this blog do not necessarily state or reflect policies of Family Care Foundation.

Even without the war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are fast surpassing half a trillion dollars, U.S. military spending is now the largest item in the federal budget. Among other line items, why does the U.S. need 750 bases and troops in over 100 countries?

Americans are losing their homes, jobs and health insurance; banks are struggling--and the Iraq war appears to have aggravated all these domestic woes. One central question should be whether Iraq is really the best place to invest $411 million every day in present spending alone.

The bill on the Iraqi War alone accumulates at the rate of almost $5,000 every second!

Granted, the cost estimates are squishy and controversial, partly because the $12.5 billion a month that we're now paying for Iraq is only a down payment. We'll still be making disability payments to Iraq war veterans 50 years from now.

Using official budget figures, William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York, provides a number of helpful comparisons:
- At $141.7 billion, the 2008 spent on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined.

- The military proposal is more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined.

- U.S. military spending is larger than the combined gross domestic products (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

A Congressional study by the Joint Economic Committee found that the sums spent on the Iraq war each day could enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start or give Pell Grants to 153,000 students to attend college.

Imagine the possibilities. We could rehabilitate America's image in the world by underwriting a global drive to slash maternal mortality, eradicate malaria and deworm every child in Africa. All that would consume less than one month's spending on the Iraq war.

 [Sources: Ismael Hossein-zadeh, an economics professor at Drake University, Nicholas Kristoff, NY Times News Service, AP]

Grant Montgomery – Grant’s Rants on International Aid and Our Global Responsibility