The $$$3 Trillion War

Seldom discussed in our current primary season are the insidious cancer-like effects and lost opportunities from the hidden costs of the Iraq war.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the wars costs. The witnesses featured the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Stiglitz and Hormats both stressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

 

In an op-ed piece in The New York Times, Bob Herbert points out that the Bush administration has tried its best "to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through “emergency” appropriations that get far less scrutiny."

“For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Investment banker Hormats cited the committee’s calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague, Linda Bilmes at Harvard, to author a new book called “The Three Trillion Dollar War," documents some of the less obvious costs of the war, including the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans, which will be with us for decades. Mr. Stiglitz pointed out that some 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first gulf war, which lasted just a month, have become eligible for disability benefits, while the current occupation is approaching five years in duration.

“Imagine then,” continued Stiglitz, “what a war — that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years — will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.”

Professor Stiglitz told the committe that “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”

Will the USA ever be singing "happy days are here again?"

Posted by Casey Kazan.

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Source Link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Comments

[Sarah]

And I'd hazzard a very dependable guess that 90% of that obscene amount of money has gone straight into the pockets of Bush's cronies!

[Mitch the Bitch]

What a load of pure crap....

War cost is DIRECTLY confirmed not by dollar amounts but by percent of GDP.

WW2 "costed" America %50 of our GDP. We defeated the Nazis (you know the SOCIALISTS). Korea and Vietnam were %14 and %9 respectively.

This war? You know the WAR that once and for all removed Saddam Hussein (a BRUTAL dictator) from power and freed 50 million people? 4 percent of our GDP. 4 fn percent you fn whining little selfish lib asshata...

Pathetic libs have no argument from ANY historical perspective yet here they are making retarded arguments based on air instead of facts....

We will NEVER be singing "Happy Days" while Hollywood, our colleges and the entrenched lib beuracrats are in charge of anything.... Feelings and emotions are not stable platforms from which to SCREAM...

The new revolution is coming and trust me WE will recall unfondly the stinkin libs that brought us here...

[Mitch the Bitch]

And Sarah, you are just a typical dumb-biatch shedding crocodile tears like an on/off switch.

Diane Feistein and her husband have DIRECTLY made many millions on this war yet you still sing the same ole song of any idiot hippy retard.

It's all George Bush all day..... Facts be damned...

What a fn moron...

[Mitch is an idiot]

Shut Up Mitch! You know that Don and Dick have made off like bandits from their associations in this war. You are a typical Bush Ball-sniffer and if you can't read and article and comment like Sarah's withouht having a Rush Limbaugh sized anxiety attack. I'm sure you will enjoy your man-on-man lovefest with Bill O'Riley.

[Mitch the Bitch]

If you could stitch two words together into something comprehensible perhaps someone besides your mommy would actually listen.

Libtards are America's enemy, Thank you for the IP address :)

[Dave]

Wow. People still say biatch? Does your mom know you're using her computer? What's with all the teenage "I'm so cool I hate everyone equally!!!" stuff? Do you pretend in your mind after you have pressed 'Post' that there is someone out here astounded by your 'intensity' or ... 'grrrr angry attitude'? Hopefully there will come a day when you learn that self control is one of the key things that set's man apart from monkey's.

[David]

I don't know why anyone complains... after all the people got what they voted for. We all deserve the farkfaced idiots in the Whitehouse, that is the way our political system works.

[Charters Of Dreams]

Sarah's math is probably correct, and interesting if it is, but nevertheless, wasted $$ is wasted $$, and "nation building" has historically been costly in other ways.

We cannot know how long it will take for Iraqi politicians to take responsibility for their country, or even whether they will do so. Given their many past failures, there is little reason for optimism. In the meantime, while Iraq's politicians dither, and our troops are risking their lives every day, we hope that the lull in violence continues. But this much is certain: President George W. Bush launched a war of choice in March 2003 that has so far cost the lives of nearly 4,000 Americans, and left many thousands more with life-altering injuries. The venture has cost American taxpayers more than $500 billion, and the meter is running at a rate of $10 billion a month.

It will be up to the next president to clean up the mess.