The rescue of downed pilots pulled off by the US military was a nice piece of work, and apparently a bargain at around $500 million or perhaps a billion give or take when factoring in all the overtime, support personnel and lost equipment (image; apology to Al Jazeera). The tip of the iceberg for us who have been pay, and paying again, since 1945.
The combined cost of the Vietnam war and all the "9/11" wars plus the current clstrfk is order of magnitude somewhere between 6 and 8.5 trillion dollars. Might we have spent that more wisely?
The cost of rebuilding a mile of interstate highway is about 15-20 million dollars. There are 48,900 miles of interstate. Now, I could have done it manually, but I let my computer tell me that for the amount of money spent on war (and those are just the cost of the wars, not the cost of maintaining the capacity for war, we could rebuild the entire interstate system 8.2 times (assuming the $15MM/mi estimate).
If we have to rebuild the system every 40 years, the annual cost would be a few miles at a time for $82/40=$2.05 billion per year. If we do it once and put the other $6 trillion into mutual funds at only 6%, we'd earn $360 billion in interest every year, minus the $2 billion for the roads. The $358 billion would pay the interest on the debt to Social Security at a rate of $300bn/yr would pay off the debt in less than ten years.
Happily, that leaves $58bn to pay me for the idea and the strenuous effort of these calculations.
Here's the deal: I'll settle for a million, leaving $57 billion for my beloved compatriots, each of whom would get a check for around $170 X the number of persons in the household, which compares nicely to the $X hundred you supposedly got from Fearless Leader, which actually came from an expansion of the national debt, while this would be a true rebate.
Are these the real numbers? Perhaps not exactly, but they're in the ballpark. And they do show that war is not just cruel and stupid; it's also very, very expensive and the reason we can't all have nice things.
