I just got done reading an article at the Washington Post Website about how much the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost a month. Quite honestly I am dumbfounded. The numbers are incomprehensible at my level. I cannot fathom the amount of money being spent.

I am not going to discuss the wars, it is overdone and boring. What I want to discuss is the money and try to understand how much money it really is.

According to the article the two wars cost $15 billion a month. Yes, I said billion and I said a month. That comes to $180 billion a year. For months that have 30 days this comes to $500,000,000 a day and for months that are 31 days that is $483,870,967.74 rounded off to the nearest penny. For February that number would be $535,714,285.71 a day rounded of to the nearest penny. That is a day. Unimaginable. I couldn't even begin to comprehend being able to spend that much money a day.

Now if we just look at the months with 30 days, we have $500 million to spend in one day. If you break that down by hour you get $20,833,333.33 rounded to the nearest penny. Almost $21 million is spent every hour. Still not comprehensible to me. Divide that by 60 minutes and you get $347,22.22 every second. So basically our government is purchasing a very nice single-family home every minute of the day in cash. Divide that further by 60 and you get $5,787.04 being spent every second. That is a very decent monthly salary being spent every single second of every day. Unbelievable.

Wouldn't it be nice to sit back and imagine the government spending a quarter of that $15 billion a month on projects that actually benefit the American people? The amount of good positive things the government could do with that money is overwhelming. They could drive down health care costs. They could fix the housing market debacle. The could probably solve a lot of the homeless issues. They could fund disease research and maybe actually cure some of them. I understand wars cost money. A single M1A1 Abrams Main Battle tank costs $4.35 million to build. An Apache Helicopter costs $56.25 million. I see where the money is going but jesus, when is enough enough? I will climb off my soap box and let you all digest these numbers.