What Would You Do With $700 B?

What is $700 billion worth? Here are some estimates from an article in The Progressive - which would love to see each of their comparative expenses government funded.

• Covering health care costs plus out-of-pocket medical expenses for all of America's uninsured: $100 billion

• Universal preschool: $35 billion

• Rebuilding New Orleans: $100 billion

• Free college education for everyone: $50 billion

• Total energy independence for the United States, with a shift to renewables within the next ten years: $500 billion

What these comparisons fail to mention, of course, is that we can't afford the $700 billion in the first place, so longing for the other things it can buy is beside the point.

The scale of spending on the Iraq War plus the Wall Street bailout is such that it is clear that political, not budgetary, restraints account for our country's educational, infrastructure, and energy failures.

Not true. We have the budgetary restraints already, which liberals gladly ignore in order to push for more unaffordable commitments.

The national debt is now more than $9 trillion.

Government budget analysts predict, however, that at the current pace of government spending the national debt could balloon to more than 250 percent of the gross domestic product by 2040.

Entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare simply will not be able to keep pace with the estimated 77 million members of the baby boomer generation now beginning to retire, Peterson and Walker contend.

About 10,000 baby boomers will become eligible for Social Security benefits each day for the next two decades, and the government already spends more than $4 on older Americans for every dollar spent on children's education, healthcare, and other basic needs.