Mind numbing: $2.4 Trillion for Wars

The Congressional Budget Office has released a rather long report which concludes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may cost $2.4 trillion dollars over the next decade. This is the same CBO which so many misquoted in their fight against the new SCHIP bill, 1.4% of the war tab for comparative purposes, because it is a trusted source of information.

With such a mind numbing figure before us as a nation, so largely attributable to mismanagement and lack of oversight, President Dwight Eisenhower's "The Chance for Peace" speech comes to mind. While the figures may have changed, the point remains the same:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more
than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953. This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?