http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071120_ron_paul_does_the_math
Cheering for Ron Paul
Posted on Nov 20, 2007
By Robert Scheer
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That money could have paid for a lot of things we could have used here at home. As Rep. Paul points out, for what the Iraq war costs, we could present each family of four a check for $46,000—which exceeds the $43,000 median household income in his Texas district. He asks: “What about the impact of those costs on education, the very thing that so often helps to increase earnings? Forty-six thousand dollars would cover 90 percent of the tuition costs to attend a four-year public university in Texas for both children in that family of four. But, instead of sending kids to college, too often we’re sending them to Iraq, where the best news in a long time is they [the insurgents] aren’t killing our men and women as fast as they were last month.”
How damning that it takes a libertarian Republican to remind the leading Democratic candidates of the opportunity costs of a war that most Democrats in Congress voted for. But they don’t need to take Paul’s word for it; last week, the majority staff of the Joint Economic Committee in Congress came up with similarly startling estimates of the long-term costs of this war.
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It is interesting when one hears costs put into comprehensible terms. I can imagine how that mythical family of four feels when they hear that they could have invested in their children or paid for the “emperor’s new clothes” (i.e., we can have ‘peace in our time’, ‘make the world safe for democracy’, ‘turn back the yellow hordes’, or what ever the phrase is for the next war). Sigh!
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Reinke Faces Life 