What Can You Buy Instead of a War?

Posted May 06, 2007

The Boston Globe has put together a slide show detailing other possible uses for the estimated $456,000,000,000 cost of the war in Iraq. Many of the causes the Globe lists are specific to Boston, but a few stand out on a national or global scale. Perhaps the most influential is this:

According to World Bank estimates, $54 billion a year would eliminate starvation and malnutrition globally by 2015, while $30 billion would provide a year of primary education for every child on earth.

At the upper range of those estimates, the $456 billion cost of the war could have fed and educated the world's poor for five and a half years.

Five and a half years of food and education instead of four years of bloodshed and increasing risk of terrorism. Also on the list were 11 million full ride, 4 year scholarships to the University of Massachusetts (or any similarly-priced school), free gas for every car in the US for almost 15 months, or thousands of new schools. Justifying this war is getting harder and harder...