The opportunity costs of the US 750 billion bailout

These are a few of the things that the bailout amount could have accomplished. Now foreign aid is actually being cut because of all the money being devoted to the financial bailout. Even this huge amount will not come near paying the cost of the Iraq war. This shows that the opportunity costs of that war are even much larger than the bailout!

· Would clear the accumulated debt of the 49 poorest countries in the world($375bn<http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,contentMDK:21725423~pagePK:64133150~piPK:64133175~theSitePK:239419,00.html>)twice over· Is almost 5 times the annual amount of extra aid needed to achieve all theMillennium Development Goals <http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/> onpoverty, health, education etc ($150bn ayear<http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/debt_aid/bp113_credibility_crunch.html>)· Is about 7 years of current global aid levels ($104bn in2007<http://www.oecd.org/document/8/0,3343,en_2649_34447_40381960_1_1_1_1,00.html>)· Is enough to eradicate all world poverty for over two years (UNDPcalculates it would take $300bn<http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2005/>to get the entire worldpopulation over the $1 a day poverty line).On the other hand it's· only a quarter of the cost of the Iraq war ($3trillion<http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Trillion-Dollar-War-Conflict/dp/1846141281/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1222593629&sr=8-1>onJoseph Stiglitz' calculation )· a half of annual global military spending ($1339 bn<http://www.sipri.org/>)http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=50