A recent report on ABC indicated that as of April 18, the Iran War cost an estimated $50 billion. The president earlier requested a trillion dollars from Congress to cover future war costs. Readers understand that they’re paying the bill. The boss did say that part of the expense could be covered by defraying monies intended for education, health care and other programs affecting detrimentally people who most need them.

But that’s OK because who cares about the poor?

Hidden away in urban ghettoes and rural hollows, they lack the voices to make much noise about the cuts. Those with them remain silent. Why bother?

A recent article in the New York Times by Nick Kristof itemized how money spent to date could have been better used.

— For little more than two weeks of this war, we could offer free college education to every American family earning less than $125,000 annually — a cost of $30 billion a year.

— For less than three weeks of war, or $35 billion, we could run a nationwide pre-K program for 3- and 4-year-olds thus making a huge difference in their educational future.\

— A woman dies in the U.S. every two hours, on average, from cervical cancer. Screening all uninsured women who need it would cost c.$1 billion and save hundreds of lives, according to Dr. Linda Eckert, a cervical cancer expert at the U. of Washington. That’s less than 13 hours of the war bill.

— We could get glasses to all 2.3 million low-income schoolchildren in the U.S. who need them. The base cost would be $300 million according to Vision to Learn, a nonprofit that does this work. The bill would be what we spend on four hours of the war. Ever wonder how many of these children do poorly because they can’t see?

— For about $34 billion a year, less than three weeks of the war, we could restore health insurance subsidies that the Trump administration let expire last year. One analysis predicted an additional 8,800 preventable deaths as a result.

The war money would save even more lives if we allocated part of it abroad. Actually, we spent more on the first three days of the war than we spent ($4 billion) on all humanitarian aid in 2025. A couple of things we could achieve internationally include:

— For a day’s worth of the war, saving more than 350,000 lives from malaria via a rigorously studied screening and prevention program (MIT economist Esther Duflo).

— For $4.3 billion, less than three days of the war bill, we could largely end the most terrible form of malnutrition called severe wasting. That would save 1.5 million children’s lives annually and accomplish something historic-for the first time in the history of humanity, large numbers of children would no longer be starving to death.

I conclude with a question for the readers, Christians in particular. Where would you prefer these billions of dollars to go? To pay for a war Trump was bamboozled into entering by Bibi Netanyahu, whose objectives, depending on the day, vary (e.g. regime change; uranium control) and most probably won’t be realized or for humanitarian causes improving the quality of life for millions of people here and abroad?

Come to think of it, Elon Musk and the boss could have footed the bill for the war to date and the humanitarian investments chronicled above and still had more than enough left to live on.

Ray Lenarcic is a 1965 State University of New York at Fredonia graduate and is a resident of Herkimer.