Guns or Butter....

At the top right of this blog, there is a counter that shows a fairly credible accounting of the cost of our war/occupation of Iraq on the Iraqi people. There are sites that keep track of the casualties among our troops, and the troops of the remainder of the Coalition of the Willing, as President Bush so aptly termed our allies at the beginning of the present phase of the Iraq War.

I've found a site that computes how costly this war has been to aspects of American civil infrastructure. It is called Federal Budget Tradeoffs, and is run by an organization called the National Priorities Project.

You can go to the site, choose city, state or region, and the site computes what your community might have gotten had money spent on the war been invested elsewhere.

For Alaska, here's the analysis:

Taxpayers in Alaska will pay $780.5 million for the cost of the Iraq War through 2007.

For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:

105,223 People with Health Care
OR 1,088,083 Homes with Renewable Electricity
OR 17,427 Public Safety Officers
OR 13,513 Music and Arts Teachers
OR 197,799 Scholarships for University Students
OR 82 New Elementary Schools
OR 4,945 Affordable Housing Units
OR 143,346 Children with Health Care
OR 108,236 Head Start Places for Children
OR 12,054 Elementary School Teachers
OR 9,331 Port Container Inspectors

The site doesn't say how much butter we might have been able to buy.