Thank you, President Obama, for announcing that we will be getting out of Afghanistan. This article on the Think Progress website explains what we could do domestically with the money we are spending over there. It's pretty hard for ordinary people to wrap our heads around $113,000,000,000, which is what our nation will spend in Afghanistan in 2011.
Putting my own personal spin on it, at my current rate of salary as a high school teacher, $113 billion approximates to 2.4 million years of my gross salary. Assuming that I live to the national average of 70 years old and would have a working life of 43 years, from age 22 to 65, what we are spending in one year on the war in Afghanistan is equal to my current college-educated wages for 55,912 lifetimes of work.
Even considering what seem to be our national fears about terrorism and our national obsession with cutting budgets, we could save more money -- and more American lives -- and maybe in 2012 or 2013 we could spend that $113 billion on educating children or providing healthcare to people who can't afford it or repairing roads and bridges. I saw a report on NBC Nightly News not long ago that Social Security will go bust in 2036, when I'm 62 and about ready to retire -- maybe we could put some of those billions of dollars into helping me and other hard-working Americans draw on the Social Security we have been paying into.
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