Money, it's a crime; Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie.

I've been known to complain that much of modern journamalism is either committed by idiots, or written assuming their readers are idiots. I'm not the only one who thinks so, Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong has a running series entitled "Why Oh Why can't we have a better press corps", in which he argues the Washington Post should pay its readers, rather than the reverse, if all was fair in the world (warning: my link goes to the Google search result. If you click on the first link, it returns a VERY big page).

Anyway, in light of my scorn, I was blown away today by the superb job the New York Times did in explaining the cost of the war versus any number of possible other efforts. To summarize the chart contained within the piece, here is the annual cost of some various projects:

• Iraq War: $200 Billion


• Universal Health care: $100 Billion


• Universal preschool: $35 Billion


• Fulfilling the 9/11 Commission recommendations: $10 Billion


• Cancer Research budget: $6 Billion


• Immunizing all the world's children: $600 million (that's million, not billion)

For completeness, I could add to this list the budgets of NASA, $16 Billion, the National Science Foundation, $6 Billion, and the National Institutes of Health, $28 Billion. Needless to say, besides the fact the war was begun on immoral grounds, has killed over 3,000 US troops and many hundred thousand Iraqis, and has dramatically eroded goodwill toward the US in the rest of the world, it is a terrible waste of resources. Hint to the Democrats: we know you want to spend money on things besides the war, but don't want to be labelled "tax and spend liberals". Try the following: say the war is a failure and bankrupting the government, and propose instead to eradicate a disease. It's been done before, for smallpox! We've almost eradicated polio, with under 2,000 cases per year remaining. Experts estimate it would cost $3 billion per year to stop malaria. Americans may be parochial about having to use tax dollars for anything that benefits the rest of the world, but I think this one has some legs. There's a side benefit, too, one that all-too-often goes unmentioned, inexplicably missing from most discussions of the cost of war.

Money spent fighting malaria goes to scientists, makers of mosquito nets, and the local workers on the ground in the affected countries. Much of this money will eventually end up in people's pockets, and they can then spend it in turn, boosting in some small way the economies of several countries in the developing world. This is the good thing about many forms of government spending: it gets used to build things that add to the net value of the world's infrastructure. War, on the other hand, blows shit up. Shit like roads, buildings, and factories (and, of course, people). Every time we bomb those things, we decrease the value of the world's infrastructure, which in its own way hurts us all. Add to that the environmental devastation, the lost productivity because people are dead, too afraid to go to work, unable to work because the factory at which they work was part of the shit we blew up, or unable to work because they have no electricity, because the generating plant was also amongst the shit we blew up, and you start to see just how bad an investment a war is. It's really not a good idea to boost the economy by building things like Humvees that are also going to get blown up, when you can invest in infrastructure that might have a lifetime of more than a few years, like roads, schools, hospitals, and International Space Stations (actually that last one is a $5 Billion per year boondoggle, I just wanted to see if you were paying attention).

Remember, next time someone quotes a cost for the war, that they are only counting the cost to the US now, ignoring the benefits that said money could have been used for, to say nothing of the wreckage we are creating elsewhere. Any war, no matter how justified, spends money that could be used to end malaria, or even to fund small businesses in the developing world, like the Rooted Cosmopolitans Charity of the Month, Kiva, to which you can donate by clicking on the link at the top right of the page. I'll leave for later the explicit argument of just how immoral we are in not spending more on these things (and yes, I should be taxed more to pay for them, especially if they really soak the rich in the process), but it should be there in the back of everyone's mind, every time they hear about the costs of anything the government undertakes, even more so when the price tag creeps into the eight figure range.