Outrage of the Day: US Military Spends $20 Billion a Year on Air Conditioning
Fucking insanity, showing the real priorities of our government. Cut aid to the old and poor? Absolutely! Keep low taxes for the super rich? Hell, yeah! Keep troops stationed all around the world requiring horrendously expensive upkeep? Abso-freakin-lutely!
posted by spooked at 7:58 AM
3 Comments:
For 20 billion a year the US could employ 20 million Afghani peasant laborers in three 8 hour shifts a day and pay each of them over twice the annual average Afghani laborers wage to fan each member of the US armed forces for 24 hours a day.
That means that each US soldier would have about 70 peasants fanning them continuously at any point in the day. That would not only provide a decent cooling breeze but also creates one heck of a problem for the Taliban.
With that many peasants productively employed, the Afghan standard of living would skyrocket and no-one would want to be an insurgent.
In fact, since 2001 the US has probably spent over $14,000 for each and every Afghan man, woman and child (including those now dead) to free them from the "oppressive" Taliban. (Iraq = $30,000 per person)
How much happier would the Afghanis be if, instead of shooting the shit out of everything, the US had simply given every Afghani individual say, $2000 each to influence their political thinking. (And that's before factoring in the savings from the costs borne by other allied forces who could be expected to chip in)
So.... for the about the same cost as providing airconditioning to US troops in Afghanistan for three years, the US could have given every Afghan resident their equivalent of a huge lottery win in 2002 to change their lives.
In hindsight, the US taxpayer and the families of those killed and wounded might notice the benefits of such an option.
BRILLIANT! :)
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