What could be done with a trillion US dollars

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Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz along with Linda Bilmes from the Harvard School of Government have recently released their estimates of the potential total costs of the war in Iraq. You can read the paper by following the link provded here; you can read a NTY article about it here. To summarise though: they estimate that total costs associated with the war may well reach over One Trillion US dollars.

For comparison here are a couple of other things we could have spent that money on:

Wiping the total debt of developing countries two times over - (Cost to wipe such debt $523 Billion USD – ref: Kapoor, S. 2005, Paying for Multilateral Debt Cancellation, European Network on Debt and Development

Providing safe drinking water and some sanitation facilities to everyone on earth for 33 years. (Estimated annual cost $30 billion per year ref: here – scroll down)