One researcher tells us what we could have done with the money we're spending in Iraq.

Have you ever wondered what $1 trillion dollars really is?

Well, that's our current tab for the war in Iraq.

Researcher Rob Simpson embarked "on an unusual but intriguing one year research project" to break down the exact dollars and cents this war is costing us. He hired a team of assistants and spent 12 months crunching numbers.

The result is paperback called "What We Could Have Done With the Money: 50 Ways to Spend the Trillion Dollars We've Spent on Iraq."

Here's what we could have done with $1 trillion dollars:

•Pave the entire U.S. interstate highway system with gold - 23.5 karat gold leaf.

•Buy every single person on the planet an iPod.

•Give every high school student in the United States a free college education.

•Pay off every American's credit card.

•Buy a Buick for every senior citizen still driving in the United States.

•America could the double the 663,000 cops on the beat for 32 years.

•Buy 16.6 million Habitat for Humanity houses - enough for 43 million Americans.

If we invested that $1 trillion in the stock market:

•Pay for 1.9 million additional teachers for America's classrooms and retrain 4 million workers a year

•Lay a foundation for paying Social Security benefits in 65 years to every child born in the United States, beginning today.

•Pay for the Bush administration's financial bailout plan, with $300 billion to spare.

Sadly, it might not be enough to pay for the war in Iraq: Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz has recently upped his estimate of the war's cost to $3 trillion.

Check out Simpson's website (the companion to his book) to go "virtual shopping" with a $1 trillion credit card. Choices range from buying sports franchises and theme parks, to helping disabled veterans and saving the polar bears.