I don't intend to use this blog often to rant, but I figure it's okay to do so every once in a while. I've been dealing for some time with living on the edge of being broke. Sometimes I use the term "poor," but broke is more apt. We're not poor; Beth and I "own" our own home, which really means that it belongs to the bank and we're renting-to-own. But after making the monthly house payment and forking over sums for the various utilities, groceries, and credit card bills, we have nothing left. And I'm not speaking figuratively here. So when it comes to seeing the enormous costs that come with the war in Iraq, (not to mention Afghanistan -- anyone remember that war?) and threats that we may need to use military force in Iran and North Korea, I really start to lose it.
That's because these days, I think of money in terms of $10 bills. My current temp job pays about $10 an hour, and so, when I take my lunch break, I sit back and think: "After taxes, Dave, you've just pulled down a cool $25." I'm not kidding, I do that. But then, if I take the luxury of buying a newspaper to read over lunch, I invariably see some figure on the current costs of running a federal government. Or worse, grandiose initiatives are referred to without mentioning the enormous price tag that accompanies it. So it doesn't take long for me to get to thinking what I could do with even a tiniest bit of that money.
According to nationalpriorities.org, based on congressional appropriations, the current cost of war in Iraq alone is about $333 billion. That's a lot of money. According to the Web site, if we funneled a mere $24 billion of that into fighting world hunger, we could cut the number of starving families this year, by half. In fact, at that rate, we could feed half the world's hungry for more than 13 years. A mere $10 billion per year would stop the spread of AIDS, according to retiring UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Or for a paltry $3 billion a year, we could vaccinate most of the three million kids who die every year of preventable diseases. Of course, that many surviving children would create other problems, but even if we did all three for the next 5 years, we'd still have $148 billion left over to address that.
Actually, this is how I used to think, back when I just had one of the lowest paid white collar jobs in the workforce. Nowadays, I only think about how I could spend even the smallest amounts of that money myself. It's hard to keep up with the counter on the page, but it appears that we are spending about $9 billion a day in Iraq. That's about $38 million an hour, $683 thousand a minute, and $10,000 per second. That's right, I said $10,000 per second.
Now, I know that pretty much everyone visiting my blog could find an economical use for 10 Gs, but since we're pared down to the bone, I could really use it. I figure that if I had a single second's worth of what we're paying for the war in Iraq, I could live on it, tightly, for about 8 months (untaxed). On two seconds' worth, we'd get by for a year, and I could probably afford to renew my weekend newspaper subscription, and visit either the dentist or the doctor for a checkup. On three seconds -- whoo-whee, we'd be in the lap of luxury. A minute's worth, spent and invested wisely, could last the two of us the rest of our lives.
Gotta go -- time to check my Powerball ticket.
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