"U.S. spending on the Afghanistan nation-building project"

"U.S. spending on the Afghanistan nation-building project over the last dozen years now exceeds $104 billion, surpassing the $103.4 billion current-dollar value of Marshall Plan expenditures which helped rebuild European nations after World War II" (U.S. aid to Afghanistan exceeds Marshall Plan in costs, San Francisco Chronicle.) Imagine if that money had been invested in America? Imagine if $104 billion had been invested in pre-schools, education, job training, and social services in the US?  Of course, if we hadn't destroyed Afghanistan in the first place they wouldn't have needed that aid.



The work of HandUp and Rose Broome is laudable ("Providing homeless a HandUp with tech", SF Chronicle, November 2017)  Helping individual homeless people is important but if you really want to change people's lives for the better, I know where I'd start. Take a look at where our tax dollars are going and imagine where they could be going.  I can't help but think sometimes that people might look past their computer screens and see the big picture.