Daily Archives: June 13, 2011

Robin Hood & the 400 Richest Families

Thanks to the folks at United for A Fair Economy (UFE), we now have a pretty good idea what Robin Hood might do with the wealth of the richest 400 families in America.

Turns out they’re not really rich, they’re really, really rich. To the tune of 1.73 trillion dollars. Trillion.

And it turns out that 1.73 trillion bucks has some serious purchasing power.

Here’s the way UFE recently broke it down for us:

    The richest 400 households can pay off every student loan for every single student in the entire United States.

    The richest 400 could pay your rent, and the rent of every renter for three years in the U.S.

    Click here to see what else their 1.73 trillion could buy.

US of A: 466.666 times safer than Canada?

Well we should be. According to a report in The Economist we spend that much more than the Canadians on defense.

In fact we spend more than the next 17 countries on the list combined.

We spend 6 times more than the Chinese, and they’re next on the list.

According to the Swedish International Peace Research Institute:

the share of US GDP devoted to the military—the ‘military burden’—has increased sharply, from 3.1 per cent in 2001 to an estimated 4.8 per cent in 2010

As for the real wars we’re fighting, we’ve spent about $783,074,577,031 in Iraq and $423,157,514,489 in Afghanistan. Of course, these figures have increased in the time it’s taken me to post this and for you to read it.

Click here for the most up-to-date estimates.

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