That's a lot of scratch, no matter whether it's one or two trillion, folks. It's so much money that the mind has a hard time comprehending just how much it really is. So, in the interest of providing factual, usable information to the fine readers of this blog, hows about we look at some examples. According to ABC's report:
"the annual budget of the Environmental Protection Agency, is about $7.5 billion. The cost of the Iraq War is thus more than a century's worth of EPA spending (in today's dollars), almost 130 EPAs, only a small handful of which would probably have been sufficient to clean up Superfund sites around the country.Lordy, thats jaw dropping news, but it's hardly something we can fully extrapolate to our own back yards, so let's bring this to a micro level maybe we can understand more viscerally, more immediately, more realistically. Enter The National Priorities Project. The National Priorities Project has a great website called The Cost Of War, which analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent. I did a little playing with their neat calculator here and discovered that Nashville would have been able to provide some 7,000+ affordable housing units with the money used to fight this.....war. Spend some time tinkering with the calculator here; you'll quickly realize that government can help with the lack of affordable housing, if we reorganize the players in a way conducive to the care of our own peoples first. In fact, with the money spent just on the recent wars our country has initiated, we could have addressed just about every social ill facing us and still had enough money left to invade some smaller but still oil-rich nation, steal their reserves and continue on with our dependence on fossil fuels until.....well, until it became someone else's problem. Gosh, I love the current "American way," don't you?
Or note that the annual budget for the Department of Education is about $55 billion, which puts the price tag for Iraq at about 18 EDs. Just a few of these EDs would certainly have put muscle into the slogan "No child left behind."
And since the annual budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Cancer Institute are $6 billion and $5 billion, respectively, the $1 trillion war cost is equivalent to 170 NSFs and 200 NCIs. No doubt a couple of those NSFs could have been used to develop cheap hybrid cars and alternative fuels. Scientific progress is by its nature unpredictable, but some extra NCIs might also have lead to breakthroughs in cancer treatment.
The cost of the war can also be expressed as approximately 28 HS's, where HS, the annual budget for the Department of Homeland Security, is about $35 billion. Really securing the ports and chemical plants would have only eaten up a few of these HS's. A few more could have been usefully spent in Afghanistan.
One last and rather tiny governmental monetary unit functions almost as spare change and has the ungainly acronym NHTSA. It stands for the annual budget of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration,
which is approximately $670 million, or about two-thirds of $1 billion. The Iraq War has cost about 1,500 NHTSA's, several of which could probably have reduced the more than 40,000 Americans killed annually on our roads.
Of course, using these nonstandard monetary units isn't quite appropriate when trying to come to terms with the more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers killed, the 20,000 wounded, and the number of Iraqis killed and wounded. The latter number is staggering, whether you subscribe to the figures put out by Iraq Body Count or those published in Lancet or to other even higher estimates.
Unlike death and serious injury, the medical costs for returning veterans, their decreased productivity, and the depreciation of military equipment can be quantified and constitute yet another huge indirect cost of the war.
Another way to get at the $1 trillion cost of the Iraq War is to note that the Treasury could have used the money to mail a check for more than $3,000 to every man, woman and child in the United States. The latter alternative would have an added benefit: Uniformly distributed and spent in this country, the money would have provided an economic stimulus that the war expenditures have not.
Alternatively, if the money was spent in an even more ecumenical way and a global mailing list was available, the Treasury could have sent a check for more than $150 to every human being on earth. The lives of millions of children, who die from nothing more serious than measles, tetanus, respiratory infections and diarrhea, could be saved, since these illnesses can be prevented by $2 vaccines, $1 worth of antibiotics, or a 10-cent dose of oral rehydration salts as well as the main but still very far from prohibitive cost of people to administer the programs.
There are also more fanciful ways to induce a visceral feel for $1 trillion.
For example, it would take almost three decades to spend a trillion dollars at $1,000 per second, and if spending at this rate occurred only during business hours, more than 120 years would be required to dispense the sum.
Another time analogy is illuminating. A million seconds takes approximately 11.5 days to tick by, whereas a billion seconds requires about 32 years. Fully 32,000 years need to pass before a trillion seconds elapse.
Of course, some might argue that the $1 trillion expenditure in Iraq has made us both more secure domestically and more respected internationally
than ever before. Perhaps as many as a dozen people agree with Cheney's recent hallucinatory comment that "we've had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes" in Iraq."
At times, it seems that the nightmare and expense of these enormous successes will continue for the next trillion seconds.
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Saturday, 12/22/07
Nashville misses goal on homes for homeless
200 dwellings envisioned this year; none were builtNashville has fallen behind on a plan to eliminate chronic homelessness, failing to build the necessary 200 housing units this year.
"We're not meeting that goal," said Metro Councilman Erik Cole, who serves on a city commission working to solve the problem. "We need significant capital." At the end of 2004, former Mayor Bill Purcell set a goal for the city to build 1,800 housing units for homeless people by 2015. That could be done if the city built 200 units each year from 2007 through 2015.
It didn't happen this year, when the city budgeted $600,000, which homeless advocates said would be enough for 50 units. Metro plans to hire a developer next month to build "as many units as possible" in 2008 with that money and other funding sources, said Phil Ryan, executive director of the Metro Development and Housing Agency.
Mayor Karl Dean said Purcell's plan remains the city's goal, as a "housing first" approach aims to reduce the municipal costs of subsidizing emergency-room visits and jail time. But it might not be easy to expand the housing effort in a tight budget year.
"Everything we do will be dictated by the funds we have," Dean said. "We'd certainly like to do more."
The lack of housing, combined with several Metro initiatives and proposals in recent years, has made homeless people feel unwanted. The most recent proposal is a Metro Council bill that could make it harder to beg for money.
But several officials said the city was starting to do more to provide affordable housing and other services for the homeless, such as health care and drug and alcohol rehabilitation.
"We need to have a compassionate attitude toward the homeless," Dean said in an interview Friday. "The vast majority of them are homeless not because they choose to be."
Shelter space is limited
Kay Rowe said she felt the city gave her the cold shoulder when she was homeless.
There were no public bathrooms available downtown at night. While Rowe often found shelter during those 10 months in 2005 and 2006, there wasn't enough for all who needed it.
"When you're living out on the street, you don't necessarily feel very welcome," said Rowe, an organizer with the Nashville Homeless Power Project advocacy group. "This is supposed to be a welcoming city."
Tensions over an estimated 2,000 homeless people seem to have risen as more people have moved into condominiums and apartments downtown. Seeing homeless people asking for money, littering, relieving themselves in doorways and walking around drunk has been a problem for many.
"Downtown residents are so frustrated that they just want to see something happen," Cole said.
The anti-panhandlin
Dean and Cole said they weren't sure the law would be effective, and Charles Strobel, founding director of the Room in the Inn homeless shelter, said it would send a bad message.
"When you begin to see an accumulation of legislation or policy that is stricter or trying to be more protective, I think it does represent a stance that we have to look at and make sure we're not violating people's rights," Strobel said. "I'd like to think that by this time in the history of our city, we have enough legislation to protect people."
But Councilman Walter Hunt, the bill's sponsor, said it takes aim at "ripoff artists," not homeless people. He called the homeless "collateral damage" in a war against professional scammers who regularly accost tourists and others walking downtown. "I just do not believe a lot of this is homeless people," Hunt said.
Park remains popular
Metro also recently renovated Church Street Park, a space frequented by homeless people across from the downtown library.
The Parks Department said it wanted to make the park less comfortable for birds, rats and their droppings, but some felt the city really wanted to drive off the homeless. "It didn't appear to me to be about much else other than that," Cole said. "I never found the park to be physically in disrepair."
Parks Director Roy Wilson insisted that wasn't the case.
"The homeless are members of the public," Wilson said. "It's a public park. Never would I want to do anything to run the homeless out of a park. That would be the wrong thing to do."
In any case, homeless people continue to congregate in the park, officials said. Wilson said the park is less of an attraction for them than the library, with its heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer and bathrooms year-round.
Some homeless people also have felt targeted by increased enforcement of "quality of life" laws against public intoxication, trespassing and indecent exposure. But Dean, a former Metro law director and public defender, said those laws weren't news to anyone.
"A safe downtown is beneficial for everyone," the mayor said. "Once you lose that, you've lost a lot. You only maintain that by enforcing laws across the board and doing it evenly."
Housing is a top need
The city's biggest problem, homeless advocates say, may be the lack of housing.
Cole said Metro doesn't own any homeless-housin
Nashville is far behind Denver, which has made homelessness a top issue and raised considerable private money for the cause, Cole said. But leaders here say they hope to start doing better soon.
Howard Gentry, who chairs the city's homelessness commission, said the panel was "focused almost to a fault on housing." It is putting together a fund-raising committee of business leaders and setting up an account to collect donations, said Gentry, who was Nashville's vice mayor from 2002 until earlier this year.
"The bottom line is, we're on the move now," he said.
Cole said Nashville was embracing a "housing first" philosophy. That approach says homeless people who can get into apartments will, with the help of social workers, take care of their mental illnesses, addictions and other problems.
"The pieces start to come together," Cole said.
The commission is waiting to receive a Vanderbilt University study on how much a day on the street for one homeless person costs the city, he added.
In the meantime, Nashville homeless shelters are struggling to meet demand for their beds. The Nashville Rescue Mission will break ground next month on an expansion of its Family Life Center, which was built for 80 people but housed 182 on Dec. 15, spokesman Cliff Tredway said.
Strobel said Room in the Inn turns away 20 to 50 people every night in winter. He said the city was "way behind" on affordable housing.
"As kind as the city wants to be, we still do not have the bare minimum of shelter beds for all who are homeless," he said.
