Here's the most wonderful Fantastic Freebie of all: donations for the troops!

If you fill out this form on HBO.com, they will donate one of the following to a solider:

AT&T calling cards, Band-Aid bandages, BenGay moist heat patches, Blender Magazine, Degree deodorant, Duracell batteries, HBO Video, Jack Link's beef jerky, Johnson & Johnson first aid kits, Lever 2000, Vaseline, Lipton powdered tea mix, Maxim magazine, Neosporin antibiotic ointment, Penguin's Tom Clancy novels, Purell hand sanitizers, Random House books, Sports Illustrated, Subpop "Flight of the Concords" soundtrack and Vaseline lip therapy and lotions.

They'll do one donation per email address so, if you have a few, use each one! Send this post -- the form takes 2 seconds to fill out -- to everyone you know.

Yesterday President Bush signed bills that fund $162 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That brings the total bill to about $650 billion for the Iraq war and roughly $200 billion for Afghanistan. How do you figure out what your financial share of the $850 billion war tab is?

Your share of the bill is impossible to calculate on a general basis, but let's try with some 2006 Census Bureau numbers. If you calculate by the number of individual Americans over 25 (195 million), you get a bill of $4,360. Only 152 million are in the workforce, so that makes the bill $5,592. If we go by households (112 million) it's $7,590.

Where it gets really complicated is that if you make more money, you pay more taxes -- and a higher percent of the taxes you pay go to the federal government, not social security. The Congressional Budget Office divided the population into fifths by their income. The highest fifth (or quintile) made an average $231,000 pre-tax in 2005. They paid 86% of federal income taxes. (This calculation leaves out not only Social Security, but also corporate and excise taxes.) That means the top 20% (or 28 million households) paid 86% of the $850 billion or $731 billion. So the average Iraq and Afghanistan wars bill for those in the top 20% is now $26,100. The top 1%, who make an average $1.6 million pre-tax, pay 39% of income taxes, so their cumulative bill would be $30,136.

Arguments about the merits of the war effort in Iraq aside, it would be nice to know that the money intended for rebuilding the country and doing positive things was actually doing just that. Sadly, it comes as no surprise to me that hundreds of millions of dollars can't be accounted for in Iraq.

The story goes like this: The Pentagon audited $8.2 billion of U.S. taxpayer money that was supposed to be spent for rebuilding. And almost none of it was accounted for properly. They can't even verify the receipt of goods and services totaling millions of dollars. Crazy items showed up, like $320.8 million paid based on an invoice that simply said "Iraqui Salary Payment." In another situation, $11.1 million was paid to a contractor based upon a voucher that didn't even show what (if anything) was delivered. Allies like the United Kingdom, Poland, and South Korea have been paid $134.8 million, but the Pentagon auditors have no idea why.

Since co-authoring The Three Trillion Dollar War with Linda Bilmes, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has tried to help American taxpayers wrap their heads around just how much our government is spending on the conflicts and subsequent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan by doing some comparison shopping.

"Try filling your shopping cart with what the cost of the Iraq War could buy: health care for every American? A new home for every subprime borrower now facing foreclosure? An Ivy League degree or two? You haven't even gotten started," Stiglitz said.

To illustrate Stiglitz's assertion, the folks at True Majority and Brave New Films launched the Three Trillion Dollar Shopping Spree, where consumers can fill their carts with $3 trillion worth of virtual items that could save the world or just make their own lives easier.

Recently, I came across an interesting figure. Congressional analysts estimate that the United States is currently spending $12 billion a month on its overseas wars. According to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, co-authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War, an analysis of the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, the conflicts and subsequent occupations will end up costing the United States between $1.7 and $2.7 trillion dollars by 2017.

Frankly, I can't even imagine that much money. To be honest, I can't even wrap my mind around the buying power of $12 billion! Still, as we're nearing tax time, and as we're debating the cost of our upcoming "Economic Stimulus Package," I started to think about how much money $12 billion is. For research, I decided to check out a few other government programs to compare the relative cost of this war.

Of course, everybody's favorite foil for the military is education, so I decided to start there. While federal funding for education covers only 12% of the total cost, it is still quite significant. According to the Department of Education, Federal educational spending for school year 2007-2008 is $68.6 billion, or just over 46% of the yearly cost of the wars. To give another comparison, in 2007, the United States total spending on highways was $39.6 billion, or roughly 27.5% of the money spent on the two wars in the same period.

In the late 1970s, when I was a kid, my grandmother and a favorite aunt of mine would take my younger brother and me along on their favorite leisure pursuits: shopping at garage sales throughout rural southwestern Ohio. It may sound awfully hokey, but we loved it.

But I don't think I'll be calling my grandmother or aunt and suggesting that we go to arguably the world's most unique garage sale on March 8-9. First, my grandmother and aunt are now in their 80s, and while some octogenarians enjoy traveling, they don't. And also, well, the garage sale is in Iraq.

Another little obstacle: You need an invitation. You also need to be part of a business with ID stating that you can operate and/or travel in the Green Zone to attend. Admittedly, that's going to be a problem for me.

But in all seriousness, according to Wired magazine's blog, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is holding a "garage sale." For the record, the U.S. Embassy is calling it the "First Annual U.S. Embassy Baghdad GSO Property Sale." (A GSO is the person in charge of getting all of the goods and services for the embassy.)

Still, call it what you want, it does sound like a garage sale, albeit a corporate one, full of high-end odds and ends. They'll be selling industrial equipment, computer equipment, automotive parts, building supplies, communications equipment, furniture and -- if my own embassy sources are right -- a lava lamp and a velvet painting of some dogs playing poker.

Geoff Williams is a business journalist, primarily for Entrepreneur magazine, and is the author of C.C. Pyle's Amazing Foot Race: The True Story of the 1928 Coast-to-Coast Run Across America (Rodale).