$2 Trillion Can Buy A Lot Of Stuff

It’s hard to comprehend what 2 trillion dollars can buy. I tried it this morning and developed my list. Do it yourself on the back of an envelope and see what you come up with.

Two trillion, that’s 12 zeros—get it right or this won’t have near the impact.

The net worth of Bill gates founder of Microsoft is $56 billion. With our $2 trillion we could create about 36 more fortunes the size of Bill Gates’--more or less. We could fund the entire budget of France for one year and still have $1.1 billion left in the bank.

For $2 trillion we could eliminate extreme poverty in the world, the cost of which is estimated by the United Nations and Worldwatch, to be about $150 billion per year for the next 13 years.

We could achieve universal literacy. Every illiterate in every country on the planet could learn to read and write, lifting themselves and their families out of grinding poverty for $5 billion dollars per year and we’d still have a lot of money left over.

And each of the following could be done as well:

For $1.3 billion per year we could provide immunization from deadly diseases for every child on earth. Imagine the savings to over stressed government treasuries by the reduction of medical costs that would follow, not to mention the degree of human suffering that would disappear. We could spend another $15 billion per year and ensure that developing countries would have sufficient resources to fight HIV/AIDS to a draw.

For another $60 billion we could achieve the World Banks Millennium Development Goals of tackling everything from gender inequality to environmental sustainability. And after all this, we’d still have $1.2 trillion left.

The average cost of a college education in the U.S. today, according to the U.S. Department of Education is $21,000. With our $2 trillion we could fund almost 2 billion full scholarships-that’s 6 times the population of the U.S.

We could fully fund the cost of healthcare for the 47 million Americans who have none, thru the year 2020. We could adequately clothe, feed and nurture every child orphaned by war and pestilence or inflicted by savage cruelty and abuse. We could upgrade the water systems of every hamlet and village and bring clean safe drinking water where none now exists and we could put a doctor within a day’s walk of every human being in this world.

We could provide a laptop to every student in every third world country allowing them to fully realize their educational potential and further the speed with which their countries could become developed and fully revitalized, and we could do the same in rural and urban pockets of poverty in the U.S. where time seems to have stopped dead in it’s tracks.

The catastrophes that could be avoided, the rank obscenities, which could be wiped away, seem to be unfathomable with such a resource brought to bear on the most galling of human conditions. Without question, we could change the planet and divest ourselves of the bleak future we face by our lack of attention to global warming. We could use such a resource to jump-start the technological switch from fossil fuels to non-carbon emitting energy resources like solar, geo-thermal, wind turbine and even clean, safe sustainable nuclear energy. We could nullify fear of a future date when some Saudi Prince might require more of our treasure than we can afford to pay for our energy needs. Then for the balance of our history, no one would ever again care which tribe killed which sect throughout the whole of the Middle East.

These are not idle dreams. They are literally within the means of the U.S., requiring only the collective social and political will to take up the causes delineated here.

The sad heart- break is that we’ve paid for each and every one of these objectives. But we didn’t get what we paid for. We spent it in Iraq or rather we will ultimately pay for the war in Iraq with $2 trillion borrowed from China, burdened on our children and their children to pay back. Some of us paid even more, giving up careers and families while perusing this nationalist nightmare. Some paid with their bodies, irrevocably disfigured and traumatized for the rest of their lives.

And to date almost 4,000 Americans have paid the last full measure of their national devotion as Lincoln once said describing the casualties of war. In every discussion of Iraq, the mystic chords of memory draw our minds back to the dead and the maimed because to them, it can never be made right, nothing will ever change.

If I had $2 trillion I’d go shopping for more than the “democracy” we bought in Iraq and I believe most people would do the same. It was a fools bargin.

But then we weren’t given the choice, we were simply handed the bill.