cc4usmc

Well not really. Check it though


What We Could Have Done With The Money


KNOXVILLE, Tenn. - 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.

So Simpson, 51, decided to embark "on an unusual but intriguing research project" to put the dollars and cents of the war into perspective. He hired some assistants and spent 12 months immersed in economic data and crunching numbers.

The result: a slim but heavily annotated paperback released, "What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We've Spent on Iraq."

Simpson is no geopolitical, macro-economic, inside-the-Beltway expert. He's an armchair analyst and creative director for an advertising agency, a former radio announcer and music critic in Ontario and a one-time voiceover actor.

His alternative spending choices reflect his curiosity and wit.

He calculates $1 trillion could pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with gold — 23.5-karat gold leaf. It could buy every person on the planet an iPod. It could give every high school student in the United States a free college education. It could pay off every American's credit card. It could buy a Buick for every senior citizen still driving in the United States.

"As I started exploring, I was really taken aback by some of the things that can be done, both the absurd and the practical," Simpson said.

America could the double the 663,000 cops on the beat for 32 years. It could buy 16.6 million Habitat for Humanity houses, enough for 43 million Americans.

Now imagine investing that $1 trillion in the stock market — perhaps a riskier proposition today than when Simpson finished the book — to make it grow and last longer. He used an accepted long-term return on investment of 9 percent annually, with compounding interest.

The investment approach could pay for 1.9 million additional teachers for America's classrooms, retrain 4 million workers a year or lay a foundation for paying Social Security benefits in 65 years to every child born in the United States, beginning today.

It's too recent to make Simpson's list, but that $1 trillion could also have paid for the Bush administration's financial bailout plan, with $300 billion to spare. It might not be enough, however, to pay for the war in Iraq. Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has recently upped his estimate of the war's cost to $3 trillion.

Simpson created a Web site companion to his book that lets you go virtual shopping with a $1 trillion credit card. Choices range from buying sports franchises to theme parks, from helping disabled veterans to polar bears.

Click on Air Force One, the president's $325 million airplane. The program asks: "Quantity?"

"At one point we couldn't find anybody who actually stuck with it long enough to spend $1 trillion," Simpson said. "It will wear you out."

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MudRacer

Can you drift on gold?

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stiizy

I bought all the shit i wanted to and still had 882,242,013,315 left over

shmiddy

interesting read!!!

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i fully de-volved

twotoes

wow that was awesome, i had 10 race tracks....one for each of my 911's and s7's. I had 23 goats, i gave food to one starving kid (yes..one!) and i had 10 airports...one for each of my racetracks

oh yeah and 10 air force ones....and i bought everyone a coke. I figured i didnt need a house....i would just live at one of the tracks. I also bought an island for my 23 goats.

rb25_s13*CHUKI

I bought like 200k polar bears and like 500k goats to feed my polar bears

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Obliterate

theicecreamdan

I adopted more polar bears than are alive today in the wild.

About 8,000 goats, enough to feed thousands of normal sized families for long periods of time, not including breeding the goats to feed even more families.

I housed more than 5,000 families

Fed 10,000 starving children

I've restored the wetlands around New Orleans and built levees to withstand a cat 5 hurricane

Built and supplied 700 hospitals in third world countries

Built almost 6,000 miles of public transit in the united states

Purchased 829,200 acres of tropical forest to be protected
150 South pacific islands

A Honolulu estate, 10 napa valley wineries, 10 yachts and every NFL franchise

and I bought the entire world 5 cokes.


Feed the people of the world and take care of the planet.

I would gladly invest the money I spent on myself on renewable clean energy. Because whoever finally does invest that money is going to end up making a LOT more money from it.

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twotoes

^^^ damn....your nice as hell

now i feal bad for only feeding one starving kid.....ok I change my mind!!! Ill feed two!

silviaguy240

fed 10000 starving
fed 10000 poor
housed 10000 families
saved 4000 polar bears
bought everyone 2 cokes
bought 10 GT2's
5 race tracks
1 airport
5 leer jets
4 yachts
500,000 acres of rainforest
4000 miles of rail way
2 islands
hawaii estate
draculas castle
~2000 hospitals
5000 gift of sight
20 superbowl adds
something to wear - lord and taylor
1000 bottles of wine
prevented katrina again
built levees

still had like 300 billion left.

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[email protected]

this is infuckingsane!

C. Senor

i did it. i spent everything but 3 dollars. i got literally thousands of stuff like save the bears, vision, build homes and jobs, and a lot of airports race tracks and paintings. i got atleast like 5 of everything. it's freakin nuts.

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Don't forget to tell your mom, she ran out of eggs this morning!

UfoZ8myCow

I bought an island. On this island you will find:

2 Bentleys
2 Saleens
4 911 Turbos
1 racetrack
1 airport
1 yacht
1 learjet
1 stick of chewing gum
12 goats
11 polar bears

I still have $972,025,454,330 left. Who wants a Coke??

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Flipzide

i got bored after buying 1 of everything on the list, lol

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