Opinion | Trump’s $1.3 Million-a-Minute War

$1.3 million a minute. If you took the cost of the first six days of the war in Iran, that’s about what it would work out to. “The Pentagon is asking the White House for $200 billion in funding for its war against Iran.” “It takes money to kill bad guys.” And that’s incomplete. It doesn’t count the cost of disability and medical care that will accrue for decades to come. One expert told me that, all told, this war is likely to cost taxpayers $1 trillion. All for this: “Deadly strike at an Iranian school that killed at least 168 children and 14 teachers.” “The strikes have killed hundreds of people and displaced millions more across the country.” “The Pentagon says at least six U.S. service members have been killed.” So let’s talk about what else that money could be used for. For less than three days of the war bill, we could largely end the most terrible form of malnutrition, where a child’s body wastes away. That would save about 1.5 million children’s lives a year. I’ve seen too many kids dying like that. But we can end that on our watch. We could make college accessible for all Americans by providing free college education to every American family earning less than $125,000 a year, which would cost about $30 billion a year, or a bit more than a couple of weeks at war. We could restore the health insurance subsidies that Trump cut so as to save some 8,800 lives of Americans a year. The cost? Roughly three weeks of war. Right now, an American woman dies every two hours from cervical cancer. For $750 million, less than 10 hours of the war bill, we could screen uninsured women for this disease. Just one day’s worth of war money spent on a screening and prevention program could save more than 350,000 lives from malaria. Just looking at the estimate of $1 trillion as the ultimate eventual cost of this war, we could have done everything I’ve mentioned and then tripled it. We’ve shown that we can cough up the cash when there is a political will, such as to drop bombs halfway around the world. But where is our political will to get people health care or education, to build, rather than to destroy?