Got $3,000.00 to give to the war effort?

Especially when Preznit Incompetent is asking Congress to make sure all those Tax Cuts For the Rich become permanent - at the expense of needed services to the middle class and the under-middle class. Like he said during the 2004 election: "the rich won't pay it, so who's left?"

Well, that would be you and me.

As the admitted direct cost of the war reached $250 billion last week -- and the White House asked for $120 billion more on Thursday -- new analyses estimate that the invasion of Iraq could end up costing $2 trillion before it is over.

If you remember, the White House's own economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, was fired for predicting, in September 2002, six months before the invasion, that the total cost of the war might reach between $100 billion and $200 billion. What I (and perhaps others who questioned the wisdom of the war before it began) remember is the hundreds of e-mails and letters I received after I quoted Lindsey and used the higher figure as more likely. "Moron" and "traitor" were among the more polite epithets of the day.

Numbers can be misleading, of course. Some, such as the long-term cost of treating damaged survivors of battle, can be exaggerated or minimized. Some can be hidden in other budgets or drawn from confusing off-budget accounts.
~snip~
But the exact figures are not the issue. The Washington issue is that the Bush administration has been lying from day one about the cost of this "preventative" war of choice. The original White House estimate of the total war cost was $75 billion, including the destruction of all Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction."

...actually, I seem to remember them telling us 1.5 billion, and the rest was to come out of Iraqi oil profits....
~snip~

The war, in fact, is a factor in the escalating cost of petroleum products here and everywhere else in the world. Leaving that aside as you watch the gas-pump digits rise to Super Bowl numbers this weekend, two anti-war research institutes, the International Relations Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, estimate that the war's cost per citizen has reached $727 -- or close to $3,000 for a family of four. By the end of this year, those figures should reach about $1,300 per citizen, or more than $5,000 for that family of four.

That calculation was based on a very conservative estimate of war costs to date of $204 billion. But even with that low-balling, those billions could have provided health care for 46 million Americans without health insurance, the hiring of 3.5 million elementary school teachers, or the construction of 2 million units of affordable housing. It's money lost in the fog of war -- or perhaps it will be used to do wonderful things for us all by Halliburton and the other defense contractors and private militaries being paid to make Iraq into Iowa with oil. (emphasis mine)

Now, I could find a whole lot of useful things to do with that kind of money, first and foremost being the complete revamping of our educational system - back to the way it was while I was growing up(I had an excellent education, back in the 50's and 60's), starting with raising the pay of those brave souls who stand up there and teach day in and day out. The Dark Wraith has an excellent post here about the educational largess that Bushco has just promised. *Note here for the record that Bushco has a very bad record in promise fulfillment.

You literally could not pay me enough to teach a high school class now a days, the way the kids abuse their schooling priviledge.

I would also use that money to fund research and development of truly clean energy alternatives, and to make our ports and borders secure.

What would you do with all the money that Bushco is dumping into the Halliburton and Exxon/Mobile coffers?