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Neil Sinhababu presents 118 things we could've bought for the $3 trillion price of the Iraq War.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Hire all the educators in America to teach Sarah Palin for five years
For the price of the Iraq War, we could've hired all the educators in the United States to teach Sarah Palin for five years, so she might actually know stuff.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 8,316,360 educators in America, from preschool teachers to professors to librarians. These educators earn an average of $46,610 per year. If we had hired them all to teach Sarah Palin for a five-year period beginning in 2003 instead of invading Iraq, we would've spent $1.94 trillion, which is less than Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' estimate of $3 trillion for the cost of the Iraq War.
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Update from the future (2020)
Hi! I'm Neil Sinhababu.
Back when I started this blog in 2008, the Iraq War had been estimated to cost $3 trillion by two top economists. That's enough to buy
a new Toyota Prius for every household in America
-- hence the name. For four months, I listed a new thing you could buy for the price of the Iraq War each day.
I'm a
philosophy professor
at the National University of Singapore.
If you want to know a little more about me, you can check out this
interview that has my views on lots of fun philosophical topics
. Or if you want to see
my homepage, it's here.
I also have a
self-titled blog
where I post occasional political and philosophical content -- mostly stuff that my friends on Facebook found interesting.
If you're interested in other random stuff by me on the internet, here's my most-read philosophy paper, "
Possible Girls
." It's about how you can have a romantic relationship with someone in another universe. It's been covered in
Valentine's Day special posts on Vox
and the
Washington Post
.
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2008
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September
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Scatter 40 mattresses outside the window of each s...
Give every American a community college economics ...
Buy a chocolate chip cookie every second for all A...
Hire all the educators in America to teach Sarah P...
Make everybody in Philly a Scottish baron
Buy each panda an Arleigh Burke class destroyer
Hire all Kenyans as sitcom actors, so Limbaugh vie...
Build a US-Mexico border fence out of marshmallows...
Buy every US adult a bottle of good tequila a week...
Buy the cranberry harvests of the next ten thousan...
Buy each US astronomer their own Space Shuttle
Pay off half of the national debt, at the level it...
Buy cars for all US women, so they can drive to Ca...
Buy every lolrus a dozen of the most valuable buckets
Give everyone in Green Bay the Lehman CEO's 2007 b...
Make every Darfur refugee a millionaire
Keep America deodorized for a thousand years
Build Large Hadron Colliders all the way up the We...
Buy enough Pabst Blue Ribbon to cover Mars' bigges...
Put a tank staffed by Petraeus duplicates on every...
Buy everything on the UK stock market
Give everyone in North America earmarks like Wasil...
Pay for Katrina and the next 30 hurricanes like it
Buy a platinum vibrator studded with diamonds for ...
Buy a stealth bomber for each panda
Buy a bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey for every ...
Buy a Bridge to Nowhere for each house or condo in...
Buy Ohio State - Michigan tickets until the sun be...
Build a wall of condoms along the Alaska-Canada bo...
Buy each coalition soldier their weight in platinu...
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August
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