Let’s have a look at the scenarios:

US spending in Iraq


Fact: Spent & Approved War-Spending - About $600 billion of US taxpayers' funds were spent in Iraq. President Bush has requested another $200 billion for 2008, which would bring the cumulative total to close to $800 billion.

$800 billion wow...what if that was spent through a credit card?

If the Starbucks Duetto Visa card was used that would mean that 1% of all the spending could be accumulated back as Starbucks rewards. 1% of 800 billion is 8 billion dollars for coffee. That’s a lot of free coffee. How much coffee well …..a lot. And since Starbucks annual income ending September 07 was reported just a little over 9 billion dollars it would mean Starbucks giving away almost as much coffee as it sold. Would Hillary Clinton choose this option for her military spending?

“Starbucks Participates in Clinton Global Initiative
Starbucks chief executive officer Jim Donald participated in the first-ever Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) last month.” Story here

What if the Hilton American Express Card was used? Let’s see Hilton and American Express is giving away 3 Hilton Points for every dollar charged to the Hilton HHonors Visa card. $800 billion divided by three is around 2400 billion reward points. They say if you redeem about 10000 points you get a free night. So that’s 240 Million nights of accommodation. Let’s divide that by the 2900 Hilton Hotels for 82758 night’s accommodation at each hotel. With 365 nights available, Hilton better have at least 266 rooms at each hotel just for US Government Rewards.

I wonder if you can book the Clinton Suite at the Hilton with these points?

General Motors and Visa offer a Rewards Credit Card. They like Starbucks also offer 1% back on purchases. With a quick calculation, if GM didn’t impose any maximum reward application, that would be $8 billion in vehicles. At an average of $2500 saving per vehicle that’s a handy 3.2 million vehicles that taxpayers may be missing out on receiving a discount for. In 2007 GM sold 3.8 million vehicles in the United States meaning the government could discount every GM vehicle owner $2000.00 on their last years purchase.

The republicans appear to be driving GM vehicles. Mike Huckabee drives a 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe and a 1995 Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck. John McCain drives a Cadillac CTS. For the democrats I think John Edwards still has an old 1994 GMC truck.

I could give you example after example of rewards for military spending from Disney rewards, Airline, Hotel, and Merchandise. The list goes on. Even if the US Government can’t charge a new fighter plane or two to a credit card, US Politicians can all put their personal expense funding through rewards cars. And that’s a lot of Free Coffee!

I wonder what the effect on the economy would be if the US Government used Reward Credit Cards for Military Spending. What do you know?