True 50 years ago......

And even more true now.........I'm guessing that the cost of current equipment is even more dramatic. At least on this, Dwight D. Eisenhower was a smart (and prescient!) man, saying this in 1953:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.

It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

These plain and cruel truths define the peril and point the hope that come with this spring of 1953.

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.

It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

I'm guessing Ike wouldn't be part of today's Republican party.

The numbers I've seen for the war in Iraq are varied, but what has been spent there could have paid to upgrade every bridge in the US (here in PA, 39% of bridges have been rated as in poor or worse condition, according to one report I saw a couple weeks ago - the worst in the US, with only DC scoring less well) and most of our crumbling schools and hospitals.

I haven't decide who I'll support in the next presidential election (way too early for that!), but I can say that it won't be a Republican (unless Ike is on the ballot) and it will be the person I think best understands that there are grave and difficult choices ahead for the US.