My Iraq Payment Plan

The Christian Science Monitor discusses something called ATI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure).  ATI's purpose is simply to show a customer what their electricity costs are as electricity is being used (as those spinning disks on the back of your house can be a little hard to read)

Many power utilities are gearing up to install "smart" meters in kitchens or living rooms to show customers the cost of their electricity use – per minute and perhaps per appliance.

So this creates a "sticker shock" for the user and in most cases causes the user to conserve electricity or at least push off non-critical usage to off-peak hours when savings can be had.

Great, another wonderful idea to decrease our dependence on energy that we will never adapt simply because we are the United States of America and we think we can afford to be that wasteful. But this got me thinking: what if we could create the same mechanism for the cost of our war in Iraq?

Every home in the country could be equipped with a meter on the door and every day this meter would list the amount of money that the household needs to pay to fund our war.  If Congress does nothing else this year, and I don't doubt they will do nothing else because they are in fact the US Congress, they must get this done. There could even be three buttons on the meter. Press A to deduct my payment for the war immediately. Press B to defer payment to my unborn children. Press C to defer payment to my children's children.

These stats are hard to find exact numbers on...for some reason. But I guess it would look something like this for a family of four:

Total cost for the war: $418,000,000,000

Good morning, your household cost of war today will be (total cost/US population/days of the war*4): $3.57

And because there are no days off in war, you pay on Saturdays and Sundays too.  Are we getting our money's worth?

Comments

[Chief Editor: Todd]

Brilliant! The reality is Americans are so disconnected from this war. If each of us had to pay a war tax, then our adventure in Iraq would have been over a LONG time ago.

[granny]

Second that!