A few numbers to ponder

The 2006 Pentagon budget is $450 billion. 
Supplemental Afghan and Iraq costs may be about $120 billion
Department of Energy costs to maintain our nuke supply is about $17 billion
The VA budget is about $76 billion
A good guess of the debt from past military spending is about $275 billion
Misc costs for other Federal departments atrributable to military support is about $10 billion

This totals $948 billion, $500-600 billion of which will be spent this year, and doesn't include some  other "war on terror" expenses, like that wall on the mexican border or the secret NSA budget.

Working that out, it comes to $3,200 bucks for every man, woman, and child living in the country.  $2,000 in checks written this year alone.

Here in Suffolk County, with a population of about 1.4 million, we gotta come up with $2.8 billion in fiscal 2006, and a total of about $4.5 billion eventually.  Give or take a few hundred million.

That's a LOT of money in anybody's book, and we might start asking just what we're getting for it.

And where it's going.