Cost of War

I'm not political, but I found it staggering to see how much the American government is spending on Iraq! Just stumbled across it as I wasted time on the net. It has got me thinking though, how much has Britain spent on Iraq and other useful stuff like that?

So it transpires before the end of 2006, the British Government has spent nearly 7 BILLION QUID, which of course, is a big sum of money. Check out the news article here back in November. Now of course, this makes up only a small part of the near £400 Billion Britain spends every year.

So THAT then got me thinking, what could you do with £7 Billion?
Here's a few ideas.

1) Cancel the total debt of a developing country (using World Bank figures for what countries owe), maybe Belize, or Lesotho, or Kenya (c. £4'000'000)
2) Go with a friend to visit the Titanic two and a half miles underwater (£28'500 x2)
3) Get as close to space as possible without leaving the atmosphere (£15'999), or actually go into space for 5 minutes (£63'299)
4)Get a wax version of myself, then get wax versions of my mates, and put them in a giant 5 a side football table, or in dubious positions with other well known celebrities (£150'000 x10 friends; £75'000 for table; £150'000 for other celebrities)
5) Take a romantic holiday for two to the South Pole (£25'999 x2)

A better Top 5 might be:

1) Pay for 166'905 families to send a child to Secondary School for 5 years in Britain (circa. £7 billion)
2) Make up the shortfall the government 'needs' to replace road surfaces, that wreck cars and can increase the chances of accidents (£1 billion)
3) Order, print and distribute 4'666'666'666 bibles across Asia (£7 billion)
4) Distribute 85 million gospel study guides on all four Gospels from Emmaus Bible School (£7 Billion)
5) Roughly £15 a month, over a year, could rehabilitate a borehole with a pump - providing water for up to 250 people in somewhere like Zambia, so that's £180/yr, so you could service 38'888'888 boreholes across the world, affecting 1 billion people for 10 years.

It's crazy to think the difference our government could make to the world if they wanted to.