Remember not too long ago, back when the human mind hadn’t begun its forced evolution of understanding really big numbers like trillions and quadrillions?  Back before TARP handed out 16 trillion to domestic and offshore banks? Or before the War of Terror cost the US taxpayer $4 trillion?

Seems like just yesterday…

For those who have decided to stay awake for their fleecing, dealing with a trillion of anything is becoming normal in our daily lives.  For others, it is hard to distinguish it from any other big numbers, be they millions, billions or quadrillions.

I got to wondering: How many ounces of gold has the War of Terror cost the US taxpayer? Well, the current price of gold is $1,616.80. The New York Times conservatively reported in 2008 that the cost of the Iraq War was approximately $5,000 per second or 3.2 ounces of gold. Basically one of these:

The overall estimated cost of war, according to Brown University’s Cost of War study, is $4 trillion dollars. How many ounces of gold would one need in order to finance a War of Terror?

Based on gold’s current price of $1,616.80, and Brown University’s estimated cost of the war of $4 trillion, the War of Terror has cost the United States taxpayer approximately 2,474,022,761 troy ounces of gold.  Include the UK’s costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, as of 2010, of another $20 billion dollars, and that brings the total gold troy ounces needed to fund the Iraq War to 2,486,392,875 troy ounces of gold or more than 12 million troy ounces of gold on the United Kingdom taxpayers’ tab.

Overall, that’s 77,335.5 tonnes of gold in a world where approximately 2500 tonnes of gold is mined each year. Above ground, it is estimated that there is 155,000 tons of gold. And so, the total costs of the  War of Terror amount to just under half of the worlds’ gold supply.

That is 2-and-a-half billion ounces of gold that the War of Terror has cost.

To be sure, we are not including the two trillion dollars that went missing from the Pentagon the day before 9/11:

Let’s include that and see then how many ounces of gold this whole 9/11-War of Terror genocide has cost us. 6 trillion and 20 billion /1616.80= 3,723,404,255 ounces of gold.  That is 115,810.82 tonnes of gold or approximately 75% of the world’s gold supply. That leaves just 39,189.18 tonnes of gold left on the planet.

Leading up to the Iraq War nearly ten years ago, the Pentagon said the war would cost about $50 billion. Democratic staff members in Congress, presumably with their scientific calculators not in-hand, for the most part agreed. Lawrence Lindsey, a White House economic adviser, estimated the costs could go as high as $200 billion, but was fired in part for saying so.

Of course, these estimates were off by an amount difficult for the human mind to comprehend. An economist in Washington, albeit a conservative one cited by the New York Times, estimates the cost of war at $300 million/day or 185,551.7071 ounces of gold.  At $400 billion a year, the War of Terror costs the US taxpayer 247,402,276 ounces of gold annually.

“This war has skewed our thinking about resources,” said a senior fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative-leaning research group.

Well, no kidding.

Truisms like this one are considered revelations in war coverage that has turned Empire building into the backdrop of daily life by not reporting on the true motivations behind the wars nor the true costs of war. The United States, via the War of Terror and bank bailouts, has spent itself into an emaciated state. The nation is ill, the terminal episode near.

http://silvervigilante.com/cost-of-war-of-terror-2486392875-ounces-of-gold/