What's gotten into me?

Posts on consecutive days? I think it was a combination of wanting to offset the previous post with something modestly informative/intelligent as well as being absolutely sickened when I read this. Sooooo, let me get this straight. We're in the middle of a recession here at home (I don't care what the GDP figures say - look around at the number of people looking for and not finding work, cutting back significantly on discretionary spending, etc., and it becomes painfully obvious that we're in a recession, as far as I define it). Meanwhile, over in Iraq, in addition to the thousands of American lives our country has sacrificed over there (not to mention countless more Iraqi civilian lives), we're apparently subsidizing their reconstruction. It would seem to make sense until you read this paragraph:

"Baghdad had a $29 billion budget surplus between 2005 to 2007.
With the price of crude roughly doubling in the past year, Iraq's
surplus for 2008 is expected to run between $38 billion and $50
billion, according to a report from the U.S. Government
Accountability Office."

So, while we at home are facing an increasingly difficult job market (I know this firsthand) and rising costs for everything from gas to groceries, the Iraqis are pocketing their chips like a risk-averse Indian who's up a few hundo at the blackjack table (how long before they create a sovereign wealth fund to bail out Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, or [insert troubled bank here]?).

I wanted to do some quick math to see what this money could mean for the average American. I found this pretty cool population clock on the Census Bureau's website, which at the time I'm writing this stands at 304,792,083. To be conservative, I assumed the low end for the 2008 Iraqi budget surplus - $38 billion, and furthermore cut the whole $67 billion in half, since I figure given their volatile history, it probably makes sense for the Iraqis to build up at least a little war chest (poor choice of words). So that gets you to $33.5 billion, or $109.91 for each and every American man, woman and child, or about $440 for a family of four. That's a lot of gum! Or gas, or Goose, or greens' fees or whatever. Whoever wins in November, PLEASE fix this quickly.