To the editor:

Over the last week or two, the U.S. has understandably been in a turmoil of hand-wringing and finger pointing over the state of the economy and the $700 billion bailout package (the paper in the bill apparently weighs as much as a newborn child).

By coincidence, at the same time, another $700 billion budget item has appeared in the budget, the Pentagon’s new fiscal year appropriation. (To date, $859 billion has been spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Congressional Budget Office projections assume further costs of $500 billion as the wars wind down, amounting to a conservative estimate of one and a half trillion to be spent on the wars).

Our brains cannot wrap themselves around that amount of money. Try this one out, $700 billion stacked in $100 bills would reach

54 miles into the sky.

While the $700-billion bailout bill has been the stuff of front-page headlines and on every talk show, the $700 billion budget for one year of the war machine has received scant attention. Ho hum, business as usual.

One doesn’t have to be an economist to know that spending money on war planes, missiles and exotic weapons systems, not to mention combat operations, creates far less social capital than spending on education, bridges, mass transit or new forms of energy.

Sadly, our economy is so enmeshed in war and making money on war ($40 billion worth of arms sent to two dozen nations in 2007) that neither our politicians nor our citizenry are addressing the unsustainability of an economy built on violence.

How refreshing it would be if the presidential debates would connect the dots between these two $700-billion budget items and seriously discuss how to build a healthy sustainable economy that won’t need further bailouts.

I quote James Carroll of Globe Newspaper Company: “That the majority of humans are in dire straits and that the planet itself is groaning are issues treated like givens of nature, yet they are results of the ways creativity is channeled and resources are shared.

$700 Billion for rescue, $700 billion for war. Something is wrong with this picture, and last week that coincidence of numbers told us what.”

Linda Morris

Langley