Burton MacKenzie

A few months back I wrote about the War in Iraq costing the USA as much as 11 manned missions to Mars. This was based on reasonable cost estimates of the time.

New data is in. According to the JEC Report, “War at Any Price?”, as reported at the Democratic Caucus's Senate Journal, the Iraq war will cost 1.3 Trillion Dollars by 2008. [note 1] This translates to thirty-two (32) fully manned missions to Mars! (see previous article for Mars costs) Please note that the estimated cost of the mission to Mars was based on "doing everything from scratch" costs, which would certainly not be the case if we went there multiple times.

To put thin in perspective, we have left this planet and landed on another heavenly body, our local moon, only six (6) times in the entirety of human history!

I just don't know what to say. This makes me feel angry, powerless, and then angry some more. Even the American citizens seem powerless to stop this. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. I also don't like the way the USA is looking at Canada's fresh water supply.

Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com

[1] Note: this amount was reported by the Associated Press as 1.6 Trillion Dollars, and this appears to be based upon the original report. At the Joint Economic Committee web journal, they state that there were numerous multibillion dollar factual errors in the report that were a number of these errors have been quietly corrected in the web version of the report on the Democrats’ JEC web site. Thus, I am assuming that the $1.3 Trillion currently reported on the website is the corrected amount.