We have found (from a book by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes) that this war could cost well over 3 TRILLION dollars.
I say "well over" because many, including the author say that this
number now appears to be low, and could be as high as 5 trillion !
I have a few snips from the book below, and some other data that is useful and, frankly appalling.
With the economy in the state it is, a recession, its hard to believe that we are letting this happen.
It is literally breaking the bank. The dollar is plummeting, oil prices keep going up, and up...
Our Gov bails out mortgage companies, but not individuals who are loosing their homes.
Lets keep in mind that the impact of high gas prices may not be felt for years.
There is a "TRICKLE" effect, where transportation costs, will eventually lead to higher food costs,
and higher costs for everything in the future.
But now, lets look at the numbers....
What is $1 trillion ? It
is 1 million , million....
If you spent $100 per
second, it would take you 320 YEARS to spend $
1 trillion dollars ! If you spent 1 thousand per minute, it would
take you 2,000 YEARS
to spend $ 1 trillion dollars !
the United States is employing more than 100,000 private contractors;
this number represents a tenfold increase over the use of
contractors during the Gulf War in 1991.
The State Department alone spent more than $4 billion on security
guards in 2007—up from $1 billion three years ago. Blackwater Security got
an initial toehold in 2003 with a $27 million no-bid
contract to guard L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator of
the Coalition Provisional Authority
(the U.S. occupational authority in Baghdad). That contract
was expanded to $100 million a year later.
By 2007, it held a $1.2
billion contract for Iraq and employed 845 private
security contractors.
In 2007, private security guards working for companies such as
Blackwater and Dyncorp were earning up to $1,222 a day;
this amounts to $445,000
a year. By contrast, an Army sergeant was earning $140 to
$190 a day in pay and benefits, a total of $51,100 to $69,350 a year.
Not only were these contractors more expensive than troops; they were
not subject to military discipline or supervision.
Payoffs typically do not take the form of direct bribes, but of
campaign contributions to both parties.
From 1998 to 2003, Halliburton's contributions to the Republican Party
totaled $1,146,248, and $55,650 went to the Democratic Party. Halliburton
received at least $19.3 billion in lucrative single-source contracts.
Halliburton's stock price has increased—by 229 percent since
the war began
the costs of veterans—their disability, veterans’
healthcare—that will total hundreds of billions of dollars
over the next decades.
This war has had a huge number of injuries, and that will mount, the
cost of caring for them, disability. 39 percent of the
people fighting,
the 1.6 million who have already fought, and if we continue,
it will of course be more than that, are estimated will
be—wind up with some form of disability.
the fact that the war has been associated with an increasing price of
oil. We’re spending money on oil exports, Saudi Arabia, other
oil-exporting countries. It’s money that’s not
being spent here at home. There are a whole set of macroeconomic costs,
which have depressed the economy. What’s happened is, to
offset those costs, the Federal Reserve has flooded the economy with
liquidity, looked the other way when you needed tighter regulation, and
that’s what led to the housing bubble, the consumption boom.
And we were living off of borrowed money. The war was totally financed
by deficits. And eventually, a day of reckoning had to come, and now
it’s come.
Well, we were very conservative in our book. When we say $3 trillion,
that’s really an underestimate.
We attributed, in our book, only $5 to $10 to the war itself
(JOSEPH STIGLITZ)
Rumsfeld said that the Iraq war would pay for itself through increased
oil revenues.
The
price in treasure has, in a sense, been financed entirely by borrowing.
Taxes have not been raised to pay for it -- in fact, taxes on the rich
have actually fallen. Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws
of economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and butter.
But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of the war are real
even if they have been deferred, possibly to another generation.
Even Lindsey, after noting that the war could cost $200 billion, said
that... “The
successful prosecution of the war would be good for the
economy.”
(Larry Lindsey is President Bush's economic adviser, and head of the
National Economic Council,)
As the 5th year of the war ends, operating costs (spending on the war
itself ) for 2008 are exceeding $12.5 billion a month
for Iraq alone,
up from $4.4 billion in 2003, if you include Afghanistan the
total is $16 billion a month.
There are many costs that the Administration does not count, the total
cost of the war is MUCH higher than the official number.
The amount paid out to survivors in death benefits and life insurance
according to the Pentagon is $500,000 (in their ledger for each death).
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A Pentagon spokesman said combat operations were costing $12 billion a
month, with $9.2 billion spent in Iraq. That's just for combat
operations. Including replacing equipment that's being used up and
providing medical care and disability benefits for the wounded, Iraq
has already cost well over $1 trillion. Back in early 2006, when war
spending was running about $5 billion a month, economists Joseph
Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes were sharply criticized for a study that
predicted the Iraq war would cost up to $2 trillion. Their sequel, to
be released next month, is titled "The Three Trillion Dollar War.
This is the first time that, at the time we went into war, we actually
cut taxes, rather than raised taxes. And even as we were cutting taxes,
we already had a very large deficit. So that means this war has been
totally financed by deficit. And that’s really been the trick
that the Bush administration—it wanted people to think that
there were no economic trade-offs. We could have a war for free.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And those deficits, the financing came increasingly from
abroad, right?
JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Very much so, at least 40 percent from abroad. So that
means that Americans will be paying those abroad interest
and—the other aspect of that that’s really
important to realize is that while we were saving zero, or household
saving went down to zero, the government had negative saving and we
were borrowing, the pools of wealth that were being created were in the
Middle East, China. So when we have an economic problem, like the fact
that Citibank and Merrill Lynch had to be bailed out, they had to turn
to these others, to the sovereign wealth funds that were held by other
countries, and that makes us more dependent on abroad.
LINDA BILMES: This raises one of the other real problems with the war,
which is how it has been financed. The administration has—and
this is the first war that has ever been financed in this
way—has financed the entire war with these so-called
emergency supplementals. Now, emergency supplementals circumvent the
normal budget process and the normal budget caps, and they’re
intended for situations like Hurricane Katrina, where you want to get
the money so quickly to the area that you don’t have time to
actually scrutinize the money in detail. But we’ve had now
five years, twenty-five emergency supplementals. Now, what does this
mean? This means that the budget folks of both parties in the Congress
and in the Congressional Budget Office and other places don’t
have time to actually look at, well, for this particular task, how much
does it cost to get it done? So it’s absolutely inevitable
that you would have profiteering, corruption, cost overruns for these
huge contracts, which are let with virtually no scrutiny whatsoever.