Guns or Butter - It's your money

drichardson · **Joined:** Sat Jun 17, 2006 2:45 am **Posts:** 1174

Some guy from the Washington Post wrote:

War Costing $720 Million Each Day, Group Says

By Kari Lydersen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 22, 2007; Page A11

CHICAGO, Sept. 21 -- The money spent on one day of the Iraq war could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity, according to the American Friends Service Committee, which displayed those statistics on large banners in cities nationwide Thursday and Friday.

The war is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute, according to the group's analysis of the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.

The estimates made by the group, which opposes the conflict, include not only the immediate costs of war but also ongoing factors such as long-term health care for veterans, interest on debt and replacement of military hardware.

"The wounded are coming home, and many of them have severe brain and spinal injuries, which will require round-the-clock care for the rest of their lives," said Michael McConnell, Great Lakes regional director of the AFSC, a peace group affiliated with the Quaker church.

The $720 million figure breaks down into $280 million a day from Iraq war supplementary funding bills passed by Congress, plus $440 million daily in incurred, but unpaid, long-term costs.

But some supporters of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq say that even if the war is costly, that fact is essentially immaterial.

"Either you think the war in Iraq supports America's national security, or not," said Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "If you think national security won't be harmed by withdrawing from Iraq, of course you would want to see that money spent elsewhere. I myself think that belief, on a certain level, is absurd, so the question of focusing on how much money we are spending there is irrelevant."

The war's unpaid long-term costs do not include "macro-economic consequences" described by Bilmes and Stiglitz, including higher oil prices, loss of trade because of anti-American sentiments and lost productivity of killed or injured U.S. soldiers.

In 2006, Bilmes, who was an assistant secretary of commerce under President Bill Clinton, and Stiglitz, a former chief economist at the World Bank, placed the total cost of the Iraq war at more than $2.2 trillion, not counting interest. The American Friends group used cost breakdowns and interest projections from the Congressional Budget Office to calculate the daily cost of war emblazoned on the banners flown in Boston, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Chicago and other cities.

The banners show what this could buy in terms of health care, Head Start programs, new elementary schools, free school lunches, renewable energy and hiring new teachers. Protest organizers say they hope to turn more people against the war by laying out its true financial impact.

"I think people are becoming more aware of these guns or butter questions," said Gary Gillespie, director of the group's Baltimore Urban Peace Program, which displayed the banners in the Baltimore suburb of Bel Air on Friday. "But when you talk about $720 million a day, even people who work on this issue are shocked by the number and shocked by what could have been done with that money. War has no return -- you're not producing a product."

dragon metal · **Posted:** Mon Sep 24, 2007 6:52 pm

Butter. Fuck war.

The Idiot · **Posted:** Mon Sep 24, 2007 6:58 pm

I can't believe it's not butter...

jethromatt · **Posted:** Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:01 pm

A serious topic, but let me quip:

I wonder just how much butter...literal, god-damn butter...that kind of money could buy.

ErrantKnight · **Posted:** Mon Sep 24, 2007 10:37 pm

Using the national average retail cost of butter ($3.52), it translates to 204,545,454 and 1/2 pounds of butter per day.

Alternatively, you could buy 742,268,041 boxes of Pocky (at 97 cents), or perhaps 6,545,454,545 packets of Ramen Noodles (at 11 cents).

Also (once again, this is per day):

291,497,975 8oz. packages of Philadelphia Cream Cheese. ($2.47)

187,989,556 16-slice packages of Kraft American cheese singles. ($3.83)

233,009,708 gallons of skim milk. ($3.09)

etc. etc. etc.

Using very rough estimations on per-year cost (average American spends $3,000 on food per year), the cost of war for one day could feed 2,823 Americans from birth-to-death (assuming an 85 year lifespan).

(Update - 18-Jan-08: Depending on which statistics I use, this number fluctuates. Another source put average spending at $7 a day for food, or $2555 a year. That would place the total at 3,315 Americans from birth to death.)

Going away from the food:

One could purchase 36,000 Honda Civic Hybrid cars per day or 252,631,579 gallons of regular unleaded gasoline at West PA prices.

(Update 18-Jan-2008: Since prices have bumped rather severely, the new total is 225,000,000 gallons of gasoline at West PA Prices ($3.20 per gallon as of Wednesday in my town), or 235,294,117 at the supposed National average of $3.06.)

It could fund the Arecibo Observatory (an important observatory which costs 2.667 million per year and which Congress is threatening to pull the plug on - despite it being the only observatory on the planet sensitive enough to track asteroids with enough precision to discover which ones may plow into Earth and which ones may pass us by) for the next 270,000,000 years.

For my most ironic price comparisons, it could purchase either 1,228,668 Colt M-16 infantry rifles (at the US Gov't cost of $586 per unit) or 4,800,000 AK-47 rifles (approximate Egyptian Militia cost of $150 per rifle - although an AK can be had for as little as $6 in really craptastic places in the world).

Finally, it could build between seven to fifteen really badass castles in the US. (Do we need castles in the US? Not really - but it would be AWESOME.)

The Idiot · **Posted:** Tue Sep 25, 2007 5:40 am

My vote is for castles.

jethromatt · **Posted:** Tue Sep 25, 2007 8:34 am

Holy cow.

Okay, next step, Steve: Castles made out of butter.

dragon metal · **Posted:** Tue Sep 25, 2007 9:41 am

Castles.

jethromatt · **Posted:** Tue Sep 25, 2007 3:27 pm

And so castles made of butter melt in the sea, eventually

ErrantKnight · **Posted:** Fri Jan 18, 2008 2:43 pm

So I was waiting for an application to install this morning and suddenly remembered the "castles made of butter" question.

The answer: 720 million wouldn't buy you a castle made of butter, unless it's a very small castle. Butter is cheap as a food-product, but very expensive as a building material.

Here's all the calculations:

My biggest problem was actually finding out how many cubic feet of stone a castle had in it, until I found this story and finally found a damn answer. A 121000 square foot castle needed 8000 tons of basalt, and took $30 million to build.

8000 tons of basalt is 16,000,000 pounds.

Solid basalt has a density of 3011 kilograms per cubic meter, or 187.9 pounds per cubic foot, if my math is right.

That would end up being (once again, if my math is correct) 106,194,843 cubic feet of basalt that went into the castle.

So to replace all the basalt with butter:

One pound of butter is roughly six inches by three inches by three inches, or 54 cubic inches. So you need 32 pounds of butter per square foot, or 3,298,234,976 pounds of butter for the whole castle.

At $3.52 per pound, you'd need $11,961,787,115.52 to get all the butter you need - enough to fund the Iraq war for 16 days, 14 hours, 9 minutes, and 36 seconds.

You could, of course, go with a smaller castle to reduce the amount of butter needed, but you'd still be better off going with stone. It's cheaper and will last you longer in the long run :lump:

jethromatt · **Posted:** Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:58 pm

i'm floored

i can't stop laughing

this is all i got
wow
good work

ErrantKnight · **Posted:** Tue May 27, 2008 8:08 am

So more on the cost of the war...

I was reading Boing Boing this morning, and Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (yup, the same guy who helped come up with the $720 million a day figure) was being interviewed by a reporter for the Guardian, and estimated the final cost of the war (including long-term expenses) as three trillion dollars to the United States, and a further three trillion to the global economy.

Ouch.

Anyway, another guy, writer Charlie Stross, took the figures of $523 billion (what we actually have spent so far) and $6 Trillion (the estimated final cost), and looked at what we could've done with the money.

Manned expedition to Mars: $450 billion (All research, infrastructrure, and prior reconnaissance with unmanned landers, plus a single round trip - further trips at $20 billion apiece). All in all, the direct cost could've been used to send six crews to the Red Planet. And bring them back, too. For three trillion (assuming a crew of 4), we could have 510 people on Mars.

Switching to a nuclear economy over coal: For $513 billion, we could buy 320 new reactors, cutting out 12% of our coal-based plants. Take that, Kyoto Protocols! For 6 trillion: could switch a quarter of the world to Nuclear. (Not sure if that's a good idea, but we could!

Also noted: could build new cities for 600 million Chinese - a tenth of the world's population.

Such things, they make me sad.

ErrantKnight · **Posted:** Tue May 27, 2008 8:33 am

Oh, and with that 6 trillion, you can build 501 CASTLES MADE OF BUTTER!!!

(And 3/5ths of another!)

BECAUSE... Well, why not?

jethromatt · **Posted:** Tue May 27, 2008 9:20 pm

This is what I hate about people who bitch about "space exploration while people are homeless." Explore space, feed the homeless, and don't start wars in Iraq, and we all win.

Cloudstrider

Guns or Butter - It's your money

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