Re: War to cost $5 Trillion or more?

P.O.W. wrote:
War to cost $5 Trillion. Worth It?
Studies: Iraq War Will Cost $12 Billion Per Month in 2008, Tripling Rate of War's Early Years

CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP News

Mar 10, 2008 05:54 EST

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show. In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the "burn" rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and co-author Linda J. Bilmes report in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with "best-case" and "realistic-moderate" scenarios, they project the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion ‹ or more ‹ by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could alone add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has done its own projections and comes in lower, forecasting a cumulative cost by 2017 of $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion for the two wars, with Iraq generally accounting for three-quarters of the costs.

Variations in such estimates stem from the sliding scales of assumptions, scenarios and budget items that are counted. But whatever the estimate, the cost will be huge, the auditors of the Government Accountability Office say.

In a Jan. 30 report to Congress, the GAO observed that the U.S. will be committing "significant" future resources to the wars, "requiring decision makers to consider difficult trade-offs as the nation faces an increasing long-range fiscal challenge."

These numbers don't include the war's cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion ‹ with its devastating air bombardments ‹ and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.

No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.

In their book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War," Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.

That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service says was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War.

Although American military and Iraqi civilian casualties have declined in recent months, the rate of spending has shot up. A fully funded 2008 war budget will be 155 percent higher than 2004's, the CBO reports.

The reasons are numerous: the "surge" of additional U.S. units into Iraq; rising fuel costs; fattened bonuses to attract re-enlistments; and particularly the need to "reset," that is, repair or replace worn-out, destroyed or damaged military equipment. Almost $17 billion is appropriated this year for advanced armored vehicles to protect troops against roadside bombs.

Looking ahead, both the CBO and Stiglitz-Bilmes construct two scenarios, one in which U.S. troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan drop sharply and early ‹ to 30,000 by late 2009 for the CBO, and to 55,000 by 2012 for Stiglitz-Bilmes ‹ and a second in which the drawdown is more gradual.

Significantly, the two studies view different time frames, the CBO calculating possible costs met in the next 10 years, while Stiglitz and Bilmes also include costs incurred during that period but paid for later, such as equipment replaced in post-2017 budgets.

This factor figures most in the category of veterans' medical care and disability payments, where the CBO foresees $9 billion to $13 billion in costs by 2017. Stiglitz and Bilmes, meanwhile, project $422 billion to $717 billion in costs over the lifetime of soldiers who by 2017 are wounded or otherwise mentally or physically disabled by the wars.

"The CBO is only looking 10 years out on everything," Bilmes noted in an interview.

For its part, a CBO critique suggested that Bilmes and Stiglitz might be overstating the expense of treating veterans' brain injuries, a costly category.

The two economists say their calculations are conservative, because they don't encompass many "hidden" items in the U.S. budget. Their basic projections also exclude the potentially huge debt-service cost ‹ on which CBO approximately agrees ‹ and the cost to the U.S. economy of global oil prices that have quadrupled since 2003, an increase analysts blame partly on the Iraq upheaval.

Estimating all economic and social costs might push the U.S. war bill up toward $5 trillion by 2017, they say.

Their book already figures in the stay-or-leave debate over Iraq.


Source: AP News

http://wiredispatch.com/news/?id=78979


A British Noble Laureate thought the war could cost $6 billion and also noted what the money could have done for the US economy if it hadn't been wasted in Iraq. It could funded Social Security for 25 years.

--
McCain on the Iraq War
* McCain said winning the war would be “easy.” “I know that as successful as I believe we will be, and I believe that the success will be fairly easy, we will still lose some American young men or women.” [CNN, 9/24/02]
* At the 2004 Republican National Convention, McCain, focusing on the war in Iraq, said that while weapons of mass destruction were not found, Saddam once had them and “he would have acquired them again.”
* "Make it a hundred" years in Iraq and "that would be fine with me." [Derry, New Hampshire Town Hall meeting, 1/3/08]
* "Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war."
* McCain on how long troops may remain in Iraq: “A thousand years. A million years. Ten million years. It depends on the arrangement we have with the Iraqi government.” [Associated Press, 1/04/08]
McCain on Bush tax cuts
* "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle class Americans who most need tax relief (2001)."
* "But when you look at the percentage of the tax cuts that—as the previous tax cuts—that go to the wealthiest Americans, you will find that the bulk of it, again, goes to wealthiest Americans. … A lot of Americans now are paying a very large a—low and middle-income Americans are paying a significantly larger amount of their income in taxes. I’d like to see them get the bulk of the relief (2003)."
* Promised to make the same Bush tax cuts he once opposed permanent (2008).
McCain on Healthcare
* John McCain supported President Bush's veto of health care for 10 million children.
McCain on evolution
* "I believe in evolution."
McCain on Iran
* "My greatest fear is the Iranians acquire a nuclear weapon and give it to a terrorist organization. And there is a real threat of them doing that."
McCain on Chairman Mao
* "Remember the words of Chairman Mao: 'It's always darkest before it's totally black."
McCain of Family Values
* "My marriage's collapse was attributable to my own selfishness and immaturity more than it was to Vietnam, and I cannot escape blame by pointing a finger at the war. The blame was entirely mine."
MCCain on the Keating 5 scandal
* "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."
McCain on torture
* "Waterboarding is a form of torture no matter how it is done and should be a prohibited among U.S. military interrogation practices . . ."
McCain on economics
* "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated."
McCain on the Clintons
* "Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is her father."
McCain on immigration reform
* "F**k you! I know more about this than anyone else in the room."
Rush Limbaugh on John McCain
* If I really wanted to torpedo McCain, I would endorse him, because that would send the independents and liberals that are going to vote for him running away faster than anything. . . .
Ann Coulter on John McCain
* McCain steamrolled the Republican Senate into adopting yet more federal restrictions on gun ownership in the juvenile justice bill.
* She'd campaign for Clinton, stating "I think she's stronger on the war on terrorism." Coulter expressed her opinion that Clinton is much more conservative than McCain . . .
*"She's smarter than John McCain."
McCain on Aging
* "I'm older than dirt, I've got more scars than Frankenstein, but I've learned a few things along the way."
McCain on the Estate tax
* "I am concerned that repeal of the estate tax would provide massive benefits solely to the wealthiest and highest-income taxpayers in the country. A Treasury Department study found that almost no estate tax has been paid by lower- and middle-income taxpayers. But taxes have been paid on the estates of people who were in the highest 20% of the income distribution at the time of their death. It found that
91% of all estate taxes are paid by the estates of people whose annual income exceeded $190,000 around the time of their death."
Cindy McCain on political payback
* "Cindy recently admitted that she keeps a “grudge list".
.

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