People like this poison the minds of others with their senseless blather, and such talk runs rampant on the floor of Congress...
The math:
$5k per second =
$423 Million per day
$3 Billion, 24 Million a Week
$12 Billion, 96 Million a Month
$145 Billion, 152 Million a Year
Which works out to being....
$725,760,000,000 over the last 5 years.
It should be clear to anyone with more than one functioning brain cell that this far exceeds our ENTIRE military budget.
The National Priorities Project have their own estimates - said to be based on estimates from the CBO - and they have slightly lower numbers:
$3951 per second
$341.4 Million per day.
$2 Billion, 389.8 Million per week
$9 Billion, 559.2 Million per month
$114 Billion, 710.4 Million per year
$573,552,000,000 Over the last 5 years...
Yet their debt clock shows....
$532,341,700,000 and counting, thats more than 40 billion dollars difference in their own estimates and a whopping $193,418,300,000 difference from the claims made in the NYT's editorial.
I want to zero in on the two examples cited, 11k Border guards OR 9k Po-lease for the cost of one day's spending in Iraq (423 million):
11k border guards, splitting 423 Million dollars would work out to $38,454 each.... Roughly their annual salary.
9k Cops, $47,000, ostensibly annual salary.
They over-estimated the cost of IRAQ (which clearly includes far more than Iraq spending) to come up with these figures. Lets apply the NPP numbers:
11k guards = $31,036 Almost poverty
9k Cops = $37,933 nearly 10k less
So it appears the mantra of Iraq costing us $5k/sec all began with unsupported, unsubstantiated, highly specious claims found in the above editorial from Nicholas D. Kristof.
Back to Congress....
We do spend a huge amount of money in Iraq... So either we can afford it or we cannot. That is the question, do you think we can afford to continue that spending?
Well, Democrats feel that the spending is A-OK, as long as THEY get to spend it. Pull out of Iraq, and with all the money we save, we can do millions of other wonderful philanthropic endeavors around the world and here at home.
Eventually, the war in Iraq will end. Democrats re-allocating that money to permanent programs will ensure we are strapped with excessive spending forever.
Double whammy... Re-invest that money, you know, the money we cannot afford to spend. Did he say we spend $46 million every four hours in Iraq?
That works out to....
$3194 Per Second
$276 Million Per day
$1 Billion, 932 Million Per week
$7 Billion, 728 Million Per month
$92 Billion 736 Million Per year
$463,680,000,000 over the last 5 years... - Obama's Numbers
$573,552,000,000 over the last 5 years... - NPP's Numbers
$725,760,000,000 over the last 5 years... - Kristof's Numbers
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The left needs to get their stories, and numbers, straight.
