The Bush administration asked Congress on Monday to provide it with $82 billion in cashola labeled "Funding for the War on Terror."
The White House has earmarked $658 million of this figure to build a new embassy in Iraq.
TKID4 is normally stricken dumb and ignorant when GWB starts throwing millions, billions, and trillions around. But TKID4 is a recent home buyer, and $658 mil for a what is essentially a large mansion strikes me as a little high.
As a comparison, I looked to the most expensive real estate market in the world. London, UK. There was a recent sale in the most exclusive neighborhood of that city, Kensington Palace Gardens. Most of the 21 "homes" on that street were former embassies themselves.
18-19 Kensington Palace Gardens was recently sold to for 70m pounds or in American-speak $125 large ones. That made the property the world's most expensive private residential home. Here are the specs: 12-bedroom property, 20 car lot, marble imported from the same quarry that yielded the raw material for the Taj Mahal.
Now TKID4 is guessing that, while the U.S. embassy in Baghdad needs to be slightly bigger than the Kensington manner, it also could probably be built with lesser quality materials. In addition, the Baghdad lot probably costs 1/100th that of its fish n' chips counterpart.
So where is the $658 million figure coming from? TKID4 wonders what type of mark-up the American contractors who are going to construct this 8th wonder of the modern world will get when all is done.
Over 3.5 million people in the U.S. experience homelessness each year. TKID4 does feel the pain of Halliburton executives whose yearly bonuses ride on the outcome of the Baghdad embassy contract. But why don't we just renovate one of Saddam's old palaces for $100 million. Then we can take $538 million and provide micro-credit and zero-interest home loans to families who desperately need to get out from under the boot heels of their usurious land lords to start building equity and a life. At the very least, the money could go towards renovating the wholly inadequate public homeless shelter facilities across the U.S.
TKID4 believes that before Ambassador Worthington-Penfield-Scott Key gets his ivory handled bathroom taps in his new embassy in Iraq, Jane Smith and her six children should be able to move out of their sub-zero Buick LaSabre parked under a I-75 overpass in central Michigan and into a heated shelter.
