It's clear that 2.4 trillion dollars is a lot of money, but how much is it, really? It's hard to imagine a number that big. Let me put it in concrete terms.
Over at Gumballs.com, you can buy gumballs in boxes of 1,080 at a rate of about 4 cents per gumball. It's not the penny gumball I knew as a kid, but inflation marches on.
How many gumballs could you buy with the money that the USA is spending on war? You could buy 60 trillion gumballs.
How much is 60 trillion gumballs? I've done a little research, and a little math to figure that out, and it turns out that if you gave every U.S. public school student their share of these gumballs for 12 years - their entire time from first grade all the way to high school graduation, they still wouldn't be able to chew them all.ÂÂ Every student in America would have to chew 182 gumballs every day, even on weekends, for 12 years straight. The jaws of America's youth would be locked within a month.
Those gumballs over at Gumballs.com measure .86 inches each. That means that, with the gumballs that could be bought with the money that's being used to wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan, you could build a road paved with gumballs all the way from Washington D.C. to Dallas, Texas - and that road would be 8.38 miles wide all the way.
Put those 60 trillion gumballs we could have had instead of war into a line, and they would span the distance between the earth and the sun eight times, and then get three-quarters of the way to the sun again.
My point is this: The United States is spending a collosal amount of resources on war. Despite that immense investment, we're not seeing victory.
The conclusion is clear to me: War is a just plain rotten way to get anything accomplished.
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