Reply #7: 141 E9 divided by 300E6= 141E9/3E8= 1410/3= $470.00 based on 300,000,000 in the US. [View All]

That is a month's rent for a lot of folks. That is three of four months utilities for those in temporate climates with no a/c or heat ... That is 3 or 4 months of groceries for me as I use between $30-50 max per week... and often less than $20.

At $5.35 per hour that is almost 88 hours of labor without any withholdings in view... over 2 weeks of labor out of only 52, or 1 out of every 26 weeks going to the war for a minimum wage earner.

It is easy for Congress to lose context when they see all the exponents. And that is sad. The soldier has no human face, only flag-draped coffins hidden from view in Dover, and the public has no effective voice...meanwhile we are told that minimum wage increases are bad for the economy and that the estate tax is a horror.

This is the type of per capita debt this war is causing us.

I need not even bother to address the morality of a war of choice and the chaos that is ensuing in Iraq, the upswing in the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the fact that even our own Democratic leadership seem to like the idea of a "surge."

Getting out of this war is necessary as soon as possible. The problems cannot be solved by the West, and certainly not by the US. Hell, we -- the West -- created a great deal of them (the Shah, Iraq coups, Hashemite monarchy and Pahlavi dynasty in the first place after the Versailles Peace Accords).

Does any nation even have a leader of the moral integrity to even address the myriad problems there?

Unfortunately, it takes a broken spirit to admit defeat. Mine is broken with every IED and car bomb account of which I read.