Half a Trillion Dollars

That's how much we've spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as various security operations since 9/11. That's $100 billion dollars a year on average.

That doesn't count the Homeland Security Department budget, which comes in at a measly $29 billion in 2006. It's almost double what the federal government spends on education. It's more than the budgets of the NSF, NASA, EPA, Interior, the VA, Transportation and Labor combined. It's more than we spend on any other single cabinet-level department, with the exception of defense.

And let's face it — most of this money was simply wasted. The war in Iraq, a war of choice, has made us demonstrably less safe than we were before and killed tens of thousands of people in the process. Afghanistan is spinning out of control as the Taliban regroups, suicide attacks increase, and poppy production turns the country into a warlord-ruled narco-state. All the while, companies like Halliburton made billions from no-bid contracts, and billions more as they used those contracts to defraud the government.

It's hard to imagine the good that could have been done with half a trillion dollars if adults had been in charge. It's equally hard to imagine Republicans deciding to spend half a trillion dollars on anything that wasn't a war. But with Bush as President, it's very easy to imagine that we will squander another couple of hundred billion in the next two years. Throwing bad money after bad — what a mess.