Money well spent

In his finite wisdom and shoot-from-the-hip bravado, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most high-tech, powerful and expensive army has requested a cool $75 billion of our tax dollars to go accost Saddam Hussein . . . I mean, to get a mess of oil . . . I mean, to liberate Iraq.

I’d like to ask that we all sit back for a moment, just a second or two, and try to begin understanding how much of our money that is.

Though it is against the preferred style of news writing, I’d like to write that figure in a different way: $75,000,000,000.

The last time I saw that many zeros, I was at a Denny’s at four in the morning. Whamo!

That’s more than everyone reading this article will earn in their lifetimes – combined – and then multiply that number by 100.

I digress.

Okay, bear with me. We’re worried about terrorists attacking us, yes? What if – and a big “what if” at that – what if we take that $75,000,000,000 and toss it all into homeland security?

Gasp!

I know that some of it is destined for states whose budgets cannot handle the added cost of security right now, but it’s a minute percentage of our number.

And I’m sure that when we wage a war against an Islamic country, and our government officials use such words as “crusaders” in their speeches, the suicide-bombers-to-be in the world don’t get more pissed off and reread passages in the Koran that tell about the number of virgins they will get once they reach heaven after dying to protect Islam.

So a little math, then. Apologies.

Say we hire 10,000 men and women to work homeland security, and we spend $1 billion training them. Then, we could offer them the comfortable salary of $40,000 a year. ( . . . carry the one . . . ) We could continue the protection for 185 years.

Not for you? Howabout 40 million Americans are functionally illiterate. We could hire a few million people – perhaps college graduates who will enter the flagging economy – to teach everyone in this country to read in a matter of months.

Again, no?

The National Survey of Homeless Assistant Providers found that on a given night in October, 444,000 Americans “experience homelessness.” That number almost doubles in February. Children comprise about 38 percent of that number. We’ll say the yearly average of homeless households stands at 500,000.

We could build them all modest homes (at $25,000 a pop), buy them all meals for one year (at $4 per), build all the children better schools and still have a few billion kicking around.

Nay? We could double the estimated number of public school teachers (now 3.1 million) and increase their salaries by 50 percent (now about $43,000 per year). Leave no child behind, right, George?

A real crazy one: That could pay every SMU student’s tuition for 312.2 years. At a public school, anyone who wanted one could receive a college education free of charge.

Or, of course, we can fire thousands of tomahawk missiles, at $1 million each, and allow seven of our country’s bravest men and women to become POWs in Iraq.

Shoshana Johnson. Joseph Hudson. Edgar Hernandez. James Riley. David Williams. Patrick Miller. Ronald Young. May you remain alive and return soon.