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In the time that it took you to read this sentence, we just spent $21,000 on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By the time you're done with the rest of the article, it should be over a million. These cool -- and utterly sobering -- statistics came via the Cost of War tracker, which keeps a running tally of exactly how much money we're spending to fight the two wars.

We're not interested in arguing over whether or not that's a good use of the money, or if we should be in those countries at all -- mostly, we're trying to wrap our heads around exactly how much money the trillion dollars it's estimated we'll have spent on the wars by the end of 2010 really is. So we decided to break it down in terms of some recent Asylum stories, and see exactly what that would buy.

1. Buy every professional sports franchise in the United States for Rush Limbaugh, 20 times over.
Rush may have been rejected in his bid to purchase the St. Louis Rams, but the amount of money we've spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could not only buy him one of the 0-5 Missouri franchises, but every other team in the NFL, as well as all 90 teams that make up Major League Baseball, the NBA, and the NHL. Then we could ship him off to an alternate dimension and have him buy all of their professional sports franchises. Nineteen times. It'd surely make getting the boot from the NFL easier for him to take.

2. Give every married couple in the United States a "travel couples pleasure kit" for the next 84 years.
We all laughed at the hotel in New York that charges $195 for a kit that includes a vibrator, handcuffs, condoms and lube, but with the divorce rate still hovering around 40 percent, maybe it'd be worth investing in some pleasure kits. Since it's impossible to know which couples are going to be in the 40 percent that divorce and which ones are going to land in the 60 percent that make it, we should probably go ahead and plunk down the $195 for every married couple in America. Furthermore, with marriage being a lifetime commitment, couples are likely to require more than just a single pleasure kit in 2010 to stay fresh and vibrant -- and with life expectancy rates in the U.S. expected to top 87 years by 2050, we might as well plan ahead and buy enough to last a while. How's 84 years worth of $195 pleasure kits for every married couple in the country sound?

3. Buy a bottle of The Dalmore Sirius vintage scotch for every man, woman, and child in the U.K.
A $16,000 bottle of single-malt scotch is totally absurd, but we're also betting that it's pretty incredible. While they've been brewing it since 1951, and are apparently only making enough for 12 bottles, money talks. We suspect that if someone showed up at The Dalmore distillery in Scotland with a trillion-dollar bill in his sweaty little hand, they'd find a way to churn out enough of this stuff to go around -- and even without asking for a bulk discount on the $16,000 retail price, there'd be enough money there to purchase a bottle of the stuff for every single one of the 61 million people living in the United Kingdom.

4. Make everyone living in the Vegas tunnels a billionaire.
Steven and Kathryn, two of the 700 people who live in stinky, mosquito-ridden quarters underneath the city of Las Vegas, tend to subsist on a daily income of $20 a day, scavenged from left-behind chips from the casinos above. But with the money we've spent on the wars, we could nearly double the world's current 793 billionaires by adding 700 homeless, sewer-dwelling artists to their ranks. Each of them would be good for just about a cool $1.43 billion.

5. Pay every registered user at Daily Kos $4,458,195 to rewrite the Bible with a liberal bias.
When Conservapedia announced that it was going to be rewriting the Bible with a conservative slant, some of us scoffed: How conservative can the project really be if they're doing it for free? If we used the trillion dollars of war spending instead to pay all 224,306 registered users at the lefty blog Daily Kos to take a year off and go line-by-line through the Bible to insert references to single-payer health care and gun control, every single one of them could enjoy a take-home salary of nearly $4.5 million.

Let us know what you'd spend the money on in the comments.