Friday 23 November 2007

The Cost Of War

The BABlog wrote two days ago that Americans seem to think that NASA gets 25% of the US Budget, when in fact it is only 0.58%.

More importantly (for this post) he mentioned that the US spends US$11 million per hour (And here is a source) on the Iraq war.

Hastily I calculated that ever 13.64 hours the US spends the same amount of money on Iraq that could be spent on a $150 million probe to explore space.

In 2005 it was said that about $22 billion would be needed to fight AIDS. This is the same as spending 2.7 months in Iraq.

In one hour the US spends enough money to buy and ship 18003.27 tonnes of food aid for developing nations (based on statistics here).

As I write this the US has spent over US$471 billion on Iraq. This could buy 3140 probes, help to fight AIDS for 21.4 years assuming that the price remains constant, or 770867430.44 tonnes of food aid.

Or if you know anything about the US state of health, some of the money that could be saved could have been placed in the SCHIP program and help those that cannot get health insurance.

I wonder what the Australians spend?

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