Here’s an update on how much of a domestic issue the U.S. military occupation of Iraq is. First, one must figure out how much we’ve spent on the Iraq invasion/occupation (I refuse to call is a “war”). In November, 2007, the Washington Post estimated the financial cost (there are many other costs) at somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.3 tillion.

Assuming that we now have spend $1.3 trillion, how many school teachers could we have hired (at $50,000/year per teacher)? That comes out to 26 million teacher/years. You can spread those teachers around in a variety of ways, of course. If you hired them all in one year, you would have 26 million more teachers this year. That might not make sense, because there are only about 7 million teachers employed in the United States currently. This means that the amount we’ve spent on Iraq equals about four times the annual salaries of all of the teachers we hire in the United States for one year (if my salary assumptions are in line). Or we could spead out all those new teachers of 70 years (this is example I used in the original post), giving us 371,428 more teacher per year for 70 years, with only the money we’ve spent so far in iraq.

But our “education President” has chosen to spend this money in other ways.

See also this post on the immensity of $1 trillion dollars.