updated 11:21 p.m. EDT, Mon October 27, 2008
KNOXVILLE, Tennessee (AP) -- When the Sunday morning political pundits began talking last year about the tab for the war in Iraq hitting $1 trillion, Rob Simpson sprang from his sofa in indignation.
"Why aren't people outraged about this? Why aren't we hearing about it?" Simpson said. And then it came to him: "Nobody knows what a trillion dollars is."
The amount -- $1,000,000,000,000 -- was just too big to comprehend.
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October 29, 2008...8:09 am
Rob Simpson wondered if Americans understood just how much money we were spending in Iraq and so he went on a quest to explain it, in real terms. When spending reached $1 trillion, he wrote a book and created a website: What We Could Have Done With the Money. In the book, Simpson describes how we could have done the farcial (paved the entire interstate system in 14k gold) to the practical (given every student in the US a free college education). At the website, you can go on a $1 trillion shopping spree. I tried to spend $1 trillion and ended up at $110,146,165,100. Here’s what I bought for that amount of money:
Full Story here.
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Have you ever wondered what $1 trillion dollars really is?
Well, that's our current tab for the war in Iraq.
Researcher Rob Simpson embarked "on an unusual but intriguing one year research project" to break down the exact dollars and cents this war is costing us. He hired a team of assistants and spent 12 months crunching numbers.
Full Story here.
October 28th, 2008
As reported by Duncan Mansfield, a Knoxvillian named Rob Simpson was indignant when he heard that the cost of war in Iraq had hit $1 trillion. So he spent a year of his life putting that cost in perspective in a book called What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways To Spend the Trillion Dollars We’ve Spent on Iraq.
Full Story here.
Rob Simpson. Hyperion, $9.95 (128p) ISBN 978-1-4013-2308-0
With acerbic wit and contagious indignation, Simpson examines how the United States could have better spent the trillion dollars allocated to fund the Iraq War. His 50 alternatives mix the satirical with the sincere: paving America's streets with gold, paying off the entire country's credit card debt, providing every human on earth with an iPod, flying all Iraqi citizens to a Major League Baseball game as well as caring for returning veterans, providing free college education for all Americans, rebuilding New Orleans and rectifying Social Security and Medicare. Although Simpson clearly means to entertain, his slim book is also a provocation and call to action—he astutely notes that even a fraction of the trillion dollars could have been spent beefing up woefully understaffed American airport security or developing technologies to massively reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil—measures that would arguably do much in guaranteeing American security. Whatever their political affiliation or support for the war, readers will confront the financial cost of the war and re-examine their government's—and their own—priorities.
Originally posted: July 1, 2008 11:52 AM
The mail just brought me a copy of the new book, "What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We've Spent in Iraq," by Rob Simpson. Most of them involve expansion of the federal government, which is not my preferred option. I'd rather we--if by "we'" you mean the government--hadn't spent that money at all. But of all the options, my favorite is "Pave the Streets with Gold." Simpson estimates we could have coated every inch of every highway in this country with 23.5-karat gold leaf for $355 billion. "Clearly, this is most absurd idea in the book," he says. "Though one might still argue that it makes more sense than invading Iraq."
We might also be done by now.
Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune
Rob Simpson, author of What We Could Have Done With The Money, has asked what the US could have had for that trillion dollars if it hadn't spent it on war. Some of his answers are sad (pay every Iraqi 3X their average income to stay peaceful), some are tragic (rebuild and protect New Orleans for only 213 billion), others are comic. But they all put into perspective that was lost wasn't just lives, it was opportunity. Money used to kill people, drive up the price of oil, violate human rights and destroy the US's international reputation could have bought a heck of a lot. And Simpson has been conservative, he puts the cost at a trillion, but when you take into account deferred costs (like looking after Vets who are amputees) economist Joseph Stiglitz put the cost of the Iraq war at 2 trillion.
And Stiglitz doesn't add in certain other costs. For example, military hardware is obsolesced very quickly by warfare, because enemies get to see how it works and what its weakness is. The Abrams was once thought invincible but today foreign governments and guerillas alike know how to defeat them. A generation of military hardware will have to be replaced if the US wants to keep its edge.
It's the lives not lived, the paths not followed that make us weep the most. Rob's book invites us to imagine some very different worlds, not just worlds without the war, but worlds with what the Iraq war cost us, such as:Pay off every American's credit card debt. And hey, still have a couple hundred billion left for a night on the town. Pay off those Bush tax cuts. Nope. But you could pay, er, pay the interest on their cost for about 10 years. A solar power build out big enough to generate enough energy for two-thirds of all American homes. $10,000 subsidy on hybrid cars, leading to 40% of the US auto fleet being hybrid, and reducing gas use by 56 billion gallons a year.
Give every single American a full $600 makeover. Because aren't you all just stressed out dahllling? The World Sings As One! Stage 40,000 3 day music festivals each with 125 acts on 9 stages. Send 5 years worth of high school students to university, with fully paid tuition.
Clean up and revitalize 667 rivers.
Mass Transit! Create 6,667 miles of monorail or subway systems (about New York to Tokyo, or 60 miles in each major city). Pave every highway with 23.5-Karat gold leaf!
As Rob writes at the end of his book, the US could have done amazing things with that money. Instead it chose not to, to pour the money into a hole in the desert. And in a democracy that means that everyone failed, not just the politicians. This is a book that drives that point home, in plain figures and cold facts. It is, I think, the perfect gift for the Republican friend who's beginning to have a few doubts, because it's non-partisan, even-handed, and it's just the facts, ma'am.
And hey, the roads really could have been paved with gold!
Ian Welsh
Do you know someone who thought the Iraq War was a good idea? Then I would heartily recommend buying them a copy of Rob Simpson's very interesting and somewhat depressing new book What We Could Have Done with the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We've Spent on Iraq.
Sure, you may not want to send it to friends, if you want to keep them as friends. But maybe there's someone you dislike already who might enjoy it? I'm going to send a copy to John McCain! (And, frankly, Barack Obama could take a look at it too.)
My favorite thing about this book, other than the fifty alternatives that range from the serious to the silly ("rebuild New Orleans" vs. "Let's all go to the movies!") and all of which seem like better ideas than war? This paragraph, in the very begininng:
"A portion of the royalties from this book are being donated to Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that assists severely injured servicemen and -women and their families by building homes or adapting existing homes for handicapped accessibility."
That's what it should say in the front of Scott McClellan's What Happened, but it doesn't. Buy this book instead.