The Three Trillion Dollar War
Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 1:27 am
DAR
Three trillion American dollars, laid end to end, would stretch the 90+ million miles from the earth to the sun, and then back to the earth and then to the Sun once again and then still have a couple million miles left over.
Book Description from Amazon
The true cost of the Iraq War is $3 trillion—and counting—rather than the $50 billion projected by the White House.
Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans—for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.
About the Author
Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University is the author of Making Globalization Work and Globalization and Its Discontents. Linda J. Bilmes, a professor of public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is a former assistant secretary for management and budget in the U.S. Department of Commerce.
See also this article in Salon
The cold price of hot blood
A devastating new book reveals that Iraq will cost the U.S. at least $3 trillion. Will Americans check their pocketbooks the next time a president tries to sell them on a cheap, glorious war?
Excerpt:
"To put Stiglitz and Bilmes' $3 trillion in perspective, it's worth comparing it to the cost estimates Bush officials bandied about before the war began. The authors present a damning "Nightline" transcript in which one official, Andrew Natsios, blandly told Ted Koppel that Iraq could be completely reconstructed for only $1.7 billion. (With the war now costing $12.5 billion a month, Natsios' estimate would have been accurate if he had stipulated that it would pay for four days' worth of reconstruction. Which, considering the delusional nature of most of the Bush administration's pre-invasion estimates, may have been how long it thought it would take to rebuild the country.) Other officials settled on a figure of $50 billion to $60 billion. Larry Lindsey, Bush's economic advisor, went way out on a limb, suggesting that the war might cost $200 billion -- a figure derided by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as "baloney." Rumsfeld refused even to offer a range of estimates, saying, "I've already decided that. It's not useful." He was right: It would not have been useful for those ginning up support for a war to predict that it might cost $3 trillion.
In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war had so far cost about $500 billion. That figure was obviously far higher than initial Bush administration estimates, but Stiglitz and Bilmes suspected it was still much too low. After researching the issue, they published a paper in January 2006 that conservatively estimated that the true cost of the war would be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. Even at the time, they regarded that estimate as excessively conservative, but didn't want to appear extreme. Stiglitz and Bilmes' book, which is based on that paper, doubles their earlier estimates to $3 trillion, making Iraq the second most expensive war in U.S. history, trailing only World War II, which cost an adjusted $5 trillion (and in which 16.3 million Americans served in the armed forces, with 400,000 dying). But the authors regard even their new figure as conservative: Their estimates range from $2 trillion, in the best-case scenario in which the U.S. withdraws all combat troops by 2012 and fewer veterans need medical and disability pay, to more than $5 trillion. Add in the cost to the rest of the world, and the price tag could exceed $6 trillion.
As the authors detail, the Bush administration has used every trick in the book to hide the real price tag -- concealing non-combat casualty figures, keeping double sets of books, not factoring in support troops, and allowing the Pentagon to produce budgets so contradictory, obscure and incompetently presented that there is literally no way to determine how much it has spent. The authors had to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain much of the information in their book."
The rest...
Three trillion American dollars, laid end to end, would stretch the 90+ million miles from the earth to the sun, and then back to the earth and then to the Sun once again and then still have a couple million miles left over.
Book Description from Amazon
The true cost of the Iraq War is $3 trillion—and counting—rather than the $50 billion projected by the White House.
Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans—for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war.
About the Author
Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University is the author of Making Globalization Work and Globalization and Its Discontents. Linda J. Bilmes, a professor of public finance at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, is a former assistant secretary for management and budget in the U.S. Department of Commerce.
See also this article in Salon
The cold price of hot blood
A devastating new book reveals that Iraq will cost the U.S. at least $3 trillion. Will Americans check their pocketbooks the next time a president tries to sell them on a cheap, glorious war?
Excerpt:
"To put Stiglitz and Bilmes' $3 trillion in perspective, it's worth comparing it to the cost estimates Bush officials bandied about before the war began. The authors present a damning "Nightline" transcript in which one official, Andrew Natsios, blandly told Ted Koppel that Iraq could be completely reconstructed for only $1.7 billion. (With the war now costing $12.5 billion a month, Natsios' estimate would have been accurate if he had stipulated that it would pay for four days' worth of reconstruction. Which, considering the delusional nature of most of the Bush administration's pre-invasion estimates, may have been how long it thought it would take to rebuild the country.) Other officials settled on a figure of $50 billion to $60 billion. Larry Lindsey, Bush's economic advisor, went way out on a limb, suggesting that the war might cost $200 billion -- a figure derided by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as "baloney." Rumsfeld refused even to offer a range of estimates, saying, "I've already decided that. It's not useful." He was right: It would not have been useful for those ginning up support for a war to predict that it might cost $3 trillion.
In 2005, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the war had so far cost about $500 billion. That figure was obviously far higher than initial Bush administration estimates, but Stiglitz and Bilmes suspected it was still much too low. After researching the issue, they published a paper in January 2006 that conservatively estimated that the true cost of the war would be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. Even at the time, they regarded that estimate as excessively conservative, but didn't want to appear extreme. Stiglitz and Bilmes' book, which is based on that paper, doubles their earlier estimates to $3 trillion, making Iraq the second most expensive war in U.S. history, trailing only World War II, which cost an adjusted $5 trillion (and in which 16.3 million Americans served in the armed forces, with 400,000 dying). But the authors regard even their new figure as conservative: Their estimates range from $2 trillion, in the best-case scenario in which the U.S. withdraws all combat troops by 2012 and fewer veterans need medical and disability pay, to more than $5 trillion. Add in the cost to the rest of the world, and the price tag could exceed $6 trillion.
As the authors detail, the Bush administration has used every trick in the book to hide the real price tag -- concealing non-combat casualty figures, keeping double sets of books, not factoring in support troops, and allowing the Pentagon to produce budgets so contradictory, obscure and incompetently presented that there is literally no way to determine how much it has spent. The authors had to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain much of the information in their book."
The rest...