It's way past time to begin withdrawing from Iraq and begin reinforcing Afghanistan and find some other way of dealing with Pakistan besides throwing money into the air in Islamabad and hoping that a few million dollars land in the right places.
The Goodspeed already had bought a seven-acre property in East Haddam for half a million dollars on land that had been a Chevrolet dealership, hoping to build there.
Tiny neighboring city Inglewood landed the Ram's franchise, billion dollar stadium and the big game.
"Imagine," he told me, "if Nasa put up a billion dollar prize that said 'land something on Mars that captures oxygen and puts it in tanks'.
Trump began pawing at the property in 1974, obtained a formal option in 1977, allowed it to lapse in 1979, and reëntered the picture in 1984, when Chase Manhattan lent him eighty-four million dollars for land-purchase and development expenses.
For example, the FAA blew several billion dollars on a Microwave Landing System that the airlines had rightly warned was no advance at all.
No one would have known that a captured suspect, accused of selling arms to terrorists and of helping Saddam Hussein spirit a billion dollars out of Iraq, was landing in a crowd at the Wall Street heliport unless he or she had been alerted in advance.
The project quickly ran out of money, so Broward sold real estate developer Richard J. Bolles a million dollars worth of land in the Everglades,, before the engineer's report had been submitted.
Building thousands of base stations to support mobile services on land will cost a couple of billion dollars.
"To acquire land will cost at least half a billion dollars," he said.
At fifteen thousand dollars an acre, land is cheap.
