March 20, 2003

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Last night, U.S. Navy warships fired the following at Iraq:

40 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a cost of $1 million* each

Your cost: $40 million

Let’s think about $40 million for a moment.

Instead of shooting a bunch of killer missiles into the desert, what else could you do with $40 million?

You could:

• build a five-star hotel in Riyadh, Libya;

• buy 28 “average” homes in Beverly Hills;

• rent a typical apartment in New York City — for 1,270 years;

• build nine research centers for the National Institute of General Medical Sciences to find and catalogue all the protein structures in nature;

• fund the education of 7,977 public-school students in Mississippi for an entire year…

• …or 3,984 students in New York City;

• give $14.54 to every single homeless man, woman, and child in the United States.

That’s a lot of bread. Literally.

* The Navy once estimated that the current crop of “next-generation” Tomahawks would be about $575,000 — yet estimates of the actual cost of current Tomahawks varies wildly, from $600,000 to $1.3 million, depending on the source. If you’d like to use the lowest figure (of $575,000) for each missile, you still spent $23 million last night.

Note that the U.S. Air Force’s Tomahawks are considerably more powerful, which is reflected in their cost: $2 million each.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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