A Mere Two or Three Trillion Dollars

On February 28, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee "held a hearing to examine the true cost of the war."

Among those testifying were Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner and former World Bank Chief Economist; Robert Hormats, National Security Council adviser, and Rand Beers, who served on the NSC under Democratic and Republican presidents.

You can read the entire report here. It is 29 pages and in PDF form. It is worth reading.

Some people estimate the total cost of the war will reach $2 trillion. Others, including Joseph Stiglitz, think the total cost is going to read the $3 trillion mark.

[In a new book, Stiglitz argues that the Iraq was is now costing $12 billion per month!]

The testimony of these men focused, in part, on how the monies poured into the Iraqi war could have been used more productively. Stiglitz said "For a fraction of the cost ... we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half century or more."

Hormats noted that both Social Security and Medicare could have been put "on a more sustainable basis." He went on the describe the committee's calculations this way: The money spent on the war each day is enough to...

* enroll 58,000 additional children in Head Start for a year...

* help pay for a year of college for 160,000 low income students through Pell Grants...

* fund the annual salaries of some 11,000 more border patrol agents...

* pay for another 14,000 police officers

A further cost of the war is related to the soldiers returning home that need medical care. Stiglitz pointed out that 40% of the 700,000 soldiers involved in the first Gulf War, which lasted only one month, are now eligible for disability benefits. "Imagine," he said, "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."

Another point made in the hearing was that the Bushites have gone out of their way to hide the cost of the war. They have done this by avoiding the normal budgetary process, instead "financing the war almost entirely through 'emergency' appropriations that get far less scrutiny."

The war in Iraq has been financed in the worst possible way - by deficit spending -- by money we don't have!

It has truly become, in the words of Bob Herbert, "America's $2 trillion nightmare."

[Thanks to Bob Herbert of the New York Times News Service for some of this info.]