What Can You Buy for 2 or 3 Trillion Dollars

You could fix Social Security for most of the next century. You could build new schools for all of the cities, enroll children in Head Start, put a border patrolman three feet apart across the border with Mexico, replace most of the old bridges on the nation's roads. You could provide free broadband to everyone.

Or you can go off and spend several years fucking around in a distant desert land, fighting a bunch of people who, for some incomprehensible reason, don't care for you being in their land with 160,000 soldiers.

Bob Herbert, in today's New York Times, points out that the Bush Administration has been doing its utmost best to conceal the costs of the Iraq War. Based on the long-range outcome of the Gulf War, we may be looking at a million or so veterans on disability after the war is over. (He also pointed out that more responsible presidents didn't cut taxes in the middle of a war, nor did they engage in orgies of domestic spending.)

But this is what happens when we have a president who cares little for facts.