Monday, March 21, 2011

Humanitarian Mathematics

So the U.S. has dropped 110 Tomahawk missiles onto Libya.  At roughly $569,000 a pop, let's go ahead and say our little humanitarian venture cost roughly $62.5million.  Well okay, that's the missiles alone, not factoring in the planes, fuel, service pay and benefits, etc.  Missiles alone, we've exploded about $62.5million into Libya.

The average teacher's salary, obviously a lavish and wasteful way to spend government dollars, is roughly $41,500 per year.  While we simply cannot continue paying them this excessive amount, we did burn through the fiscal equivalent of 1506 teacher salaries in under 24 hours.


NPR runs on $164million/year.  About 5.8% of that comes from government grants to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.  That's about $9.5million per year, from all forms of government (federal, state, and local).  Truly the epitome of government waste, NPR could be funded for 6.5 years with the money spent on the 110 missiles dropped into Libya. 

Everyone knows that women, infants, and children are a huge waste of public funds.  In fact, we spend about $6.7billion per year just feeding these bastards!  Sounds like a lot, right?  Well, when you consider about 9,175,478 women, infants, and children received WIC assistance in 2010, total government assistance through WIC averages around $725 per person per year.  Our humanitarian effort in Libya could have provided nutritional assistance for 86,206 unsupported women with children for one year.

Also, it would only take about 5 more days of this kind of humanitarian expenditure to top Planned Parenthood's annual funding from the federal government. And remember, that's just calculating the missiles dropped.

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