Nicholas Kristof’s sobering column, “The $1.3-Million-a-Minute War,” forces a number into your conscience and refuses to let it go. At its peak, the war in Gaza was costing roughly $1.3 million every single minute. Not in lives — though those too — but in dollars. American dollars, mobilized with breathtaking speed and political unanimity, flow toward destruction while funding for the most basic human needs crawls through years of gridlock.
Kristof calls this a failure of “moral accounting.” He’s right. But the reckoning he demands doesn’t stop at Gaza’s border. It lands, uncomfortably, right here at home.
A Crisis We’re Choosing Not to See
While Washington debates the next defense supplemental, America is quietly sleepwalking toward one of the most predictable catastrophes in its history. By 2040, an estimated 11.2 million Americans will be living with Alzheimer’s disease. By 2050, that number approaches 13 million — and among Americans aged 85 and older, one in three already has the disease. A landmark NYU Langone study delivered perhaps the starkest finding of all: one in two Americans can expect to experience significant cognitive difficulties after the age of 55.
Read that again. One in two.