What the $315 billion dollars we're spending on occupation could buy here at home…

Bush is asking for $245 billion dollars to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq this year and next.

You may have heard that neither project is going particularly well, but we're soldiering on.

The loot The Decider seeks is in addition to the $70 billion already allocated for '07, bringing the two-year total to $315 billion dollars. That is, if he doesn't ask for more next year.

A lot of this money is for "modernizing" the military. That is to say, it's for fancy new weapons systems to replace damaged or lost equipment -- many of which, like the F-22 joint strike-fighter, are not really designed to help fight insurgencies. This is all in addition to a 10 percent increase in the regular war budget (AKA "Defense budget"), bringing it to $481 billion in 2008.

These big numbers are hard to grasp. So I took a tour around the National Priorities Project Database and checked in with the Apollo Alliance and the Disabled American Veterans to see how far that kind of lucre might have gone if spent on domestic programs.Here's what I came up with. Note that this isn't a Chinese menu where you have to pick from among the following priorities; for $315 billion we could have funded all of these …

• Energy. For about a fifth of the costs of occupying our two new countries, we could have fully funded the Apollo Project for two years. From the Alliance's website: "The Apollo Alliance is pursuing a $300 billion, public-private program to create three million new, clean energy jobs to free America from foreign oil dependence in ten years. It is a program that reinvests in the competitiveness of American industry, rebuilds our cities, creates good jobs for working families, and ensures good stewardship of both the economy and our natural environment."
• Health coverage. After funding the Apollo Project, we'd have enough left over to cover about half of the uninsured -- 23,308,236 people. That money would have gone further still if invested in a single-payer system.
• Education. That would still leave us enough to put 1,081,287 children into Head-start programs…
• And hire 134,145 new elementary school teachers …
• And build 792 new schools …
• And give 1,300,680 young people full college scholarships.
• All of those things would still leave us with enough in the kitty to close the $2 billion estimated gap between what we need to take care of our returning vets and what's actually in Bush's budget request for veterans' care.
• And we'd have enough left over to build 61,292 new affordable housing units

Just to put those colossal numbers in perspective.

PS: ABC News did a similar exercise looking at all of the war spending since 9/11 -- that's $750 billion including the 2007-2008 requests (more than we spent in Vietnam). They point out that that figure could have funded the EPA for over a century; the entire Department of Education for two decades or the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration for 1500 years. An increase in spending on the latter, they note, "could probably have reduced the more than 40,000 Americans killed annually on our roads." Check it.