I have saved this (oh, like Libby, but on the “refrigerator file”) for a long time. Back in the day, Reagan wanted $3 trillion for “Star Wars” defense. I think the estimated cost for this mess in Iraq is said to be a trillion or three?

Ann Landers had a reader (Frank A. South, Plainfield, NJ) who reported that it would take 32 years (one per second, 24/7) to count to a trillion.

…

We are talking serious cash here.

Thirty-two years are about equal to, not a trillion seconds, but “only” a billion (a thousand million). A trillion would be 1,000 times greater — that is, a trillion seconds are equal to roughly 32,000 years.

If Paul Bremer were to sit on the tailgate of a pickup truck in Baghdad and wad up and toss a $100 bill each second, day in and day out, for an entire year, at the end of that year after all of his hard work he would only have thrown away about a third of the ten billion or so that actually disappeared under his leadership as head of the CPA.

And ten billion is just one percent of a trillion.

These are very big numbers.

With kind regards,
Dog, etc.
god knows i tried

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Note to Dems: Balk and that money will be coming back to the Republicans in the form of ‘campaign contributions’ for DECADES.

Why won’t anyone talk about the $47 billion that *was* spent properly? That’s an awful lot of well-spent money to just ignore.

You’re kidding right? That’s like a bank robber saying, “Why won’t anyone talk about the 50 banks in the city that I DIDN’T rob?”

I have saved this (oh, like Libby, but on the “refrigerator file”) for a long time. Back in the day, Reagan wanted $3 trillion for “Star Wars” defense. I think the estimated cost for this mess in Iraq is said to be a trillion or three?

Ann Landers had a reader (Frank A. South, Plainfield, NJ) who reported that it would take 32 years (one per second, 24/7) to count to a trillion.

He said with a trillion bucks you could buy a $100K house for every family in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Iowa. Then you could put a $10,000 car in every home and still have enough money left to build $10M libraries and $10M hospitals for 250 cities in those states. Then there would still be enough left to build $10M schools for 500 communities.

And still enough left to put into the bank, and from interest alone to pay 10,000 nurses and teachers plus give a $5K bonus for every family in those states.

We are talking serious cash here.

Yes, it is. Levees, physical, transportation and social infrastructure for NOLA. Free post secondary ed. Free healthcare for everyone. Any one (or more) of these would have been a far better investment of money and energy.

San Diego, being a military town, in a sense, loves his kind of talk. Less and less though. I think a good opposition candidate could take him down.

Do not know. Let’s see what we can find out.

Googling revealed the following rather amusing column on Issa by Debbie Schlussel. Of course, knowing Schlussel, this may all just be her usual creative imaginings, but given that she’s bashing a fellow rethug here, perhaps there’s some merit in her charges. Either that or her rethug penchant for racism exceeds even her party loyalty.

http://www.politicalusa.com/co…..el_003.htm

The lack of any real accounting systems in place from the time of the CPA means that there’s no way to determine the waste, even if auditors are looking at satisfactorily completed projects. And, the absence of auditing during the contract terms has meant that the money couldn’t be saved before it was spent. At a time when the DoD seized partial control of such projects from State and USAID, the DoD was also reducing the number of auditors available to the DoD. (Thanks, Rummy, sayeth the war profiteers.)

Then, there’s the practice of evading outside scrutiny by contract terms allowing firms–especially those privately-held–to withhold contract practices information even from auditors as confidential, proprietary information and you’ve got an unholy mess–just like the rest of the war, just like the rest of the Bush administration.

Add it all up, and I’d guess about one-third of the money has been lost, in one way or another, either by contractor-friendly contract terms, outright theft, lack of generally-accepted accounting practice and failure to oversee contracts during and after initiation of work.

Darrell Issa can eat my shorts.