Hightower Lowdown

George W has sent a 2009 budget to Congress, and here's how to sum it up: Domestic needs $0, Pentagon $515 billion.

At the same time that Bush is slashing healthcare programs and making drastic cuts in the Centers for Disease Control, low-income energy assistance, and family literacy, he wants half a trillion bucks for the military PLUS the money he is throwing down the hellhole of Iraq. His accounting rules allow war costs to go off budget, charged to the credit cards of our grandchildren, great-grandchildren... and beyond.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has calculated the total cost of just the first four years of George's Iraq misadventure. Counting such deferred costs as interest on the war debt and long-term care for the wounded, the tab is $720 million per day.

The American Friends Service Committee has analyzed what America could buy with only a single day's worth of the money we're spending on this misbegotten war. For $720million, we could:

• Provide health coverage for a year for 424,000 children.
• Build 84brand new schools.
• Buy school lunches for a year for 1.2 million needy kids.
• Provide 6,482 units of affordable housing.
• Pay for a year of renewable-energy electricity in 1.3 million homes.
• Pay the annual salaries of 12,500 new classroom teachers.
• Put 35,000 students through a 4-year state college.

Any of these could be had for just one day of war funding.