NY Times op/ed: "The Trillion-Dollar War" - How many realize how much

[Nothing Without Hope]

they are paying for Bush's wars in CASH, let alone the deaths, maimings, trauma, and all the other horrors here and abroad? So far, the US has spent about 250 billion dollars in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but if they last even just another 5 years, the total U.S. cost is reasonably estimated at over a trillion. That works out to about $10,000 per U.S. household.

The author of this article was assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce under Clinton and teaches public finance and budgeting at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, so she knows something about what she is saying.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/opinion/20bilmes.html
Op-Ed Contributor

The Trillion-Dollar War

By LINDA BILMES
Published: August 20, 2005

THE human cost of the more than 2,000 American military personnel killed and 14,500 wounded so far in Iraq and Afghanistan is all too apparent. But the financial toll is still largely hidden from public view and, like the suffering of those who have lost loved ones, will persist long after the fighting is over.

(snip)

But the biggest long-term costs are disability and health payments for returning troops, which will be incurred even if hostilities were to stop tomorrow. The United States currently pays more than $2 billion in disability claims per year for 159,000 veterans of the 1991 gulf war, even though that conflict lasted only five weeks, with 148 dead and 467 wounded. Even assuming that the 525,000 American troops who have so far served in Iraq and Afghanistan will require treatment only on the same scale as their predecessors from the gulf war, these payments are likely to run at $7 billion a year for the next 45 years.

All of this spending will need to be financed by adding to the federal debt. Extra interest payments will total $200 billion or more even if the borrowing is repaid quickly. Conflict in the Middle East has also played a part in doubling the price of oil from $30 a barrel just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to $60 a barrel today. Each $5 increase in the price of oil reduces our national income by about $17 billion a year.

Even by this simple yardstick, if the American military presence in the region lasts another five years, the total outlay for the war could stretch to more than $1.3 trillion, or $11,300 for every household in the United States.

[rfranklin]

1. No problem! Keep the Republicans in power and...

they will throw the vets out on the street with no health care or benefits telling them they are unpatriotic, lazy legless bums.

[mikelewis]

12. Bullshit... Put on artificial legs and send them back.

You know how much it costs to train a soldier? Throw a couple of prostetic legs on em and send them back in! Why piss away a perfectly good breathing body?:sarcasm:

[achtung_circus]

13. And if a soldier with prosthetic legs steps on a land mine

you don't have to send him/her to an expensive hospital. Just run them into the shop for new parts.

[krkaufman]

2. typo that you may want to edit...

"So far, the US has spent about 250 million dollars in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan"

make that billions

[Nothing Without Hope]

3. Thanks for catching that typo. Even between friends, a factor of 1000

has some major impact!

[izzie]

4. All so Bush can ride around in a new uniform. What a waste.

Wimps with big egos.

[pretzel4gore]

5. the ny times ed board needs to be put down

what liars. building sandcastles on the seashore, before incoming tide, and saying 'look! look!' if the nytimes wanted to alert the people, they'd mention the incalculatable damage done by the 'plunge protection team' and the tens of billions stolen outright by the busheviks nazipoos (who hope the money will save them when the us wises up and begans rounding them all up)
the media managers who've assisted bush and the gopig so well since reagan's time need their day in court, then quick painless executions
...trying to defelect attention by publishing conjectures about cost of military actions is typical pigmedia bushit

[teryang]

6. This is an underestimate

Which takes into account only the arithmetic of government budgetary expenditures. There is also:

The opportunity cost of the anticipation of the war which inhibited business investment from the day the neo-cons took power.

The diastrous impact on foreign exchange rates.

The opportunity cost of misallocation of resources on negative sanctions rather than productive capital investments.

The misconception that this war policy was an energy policy.

The continued inhibition on productive investment based upon uncertainty and opportunistic exploitation of ballooning defense expenditures by an unethical social elite.

The inflationary impact on the increased demand for resources with no productive applications.

The acceleration of the political and economic decline of the nation due to the engagement in imprudent wars by a corrupt elite, used to distract the public from other predatory legislation (explained in Kevin Phillips book Wealth and Democracy).

The socio-economic reality is that the maladaptive application of capital resources to war and preparation for war by a society already in decline as represented by the huge and unjustifiable expansion of Pentagon contractor budgets has taken us down a path to ruin. This wrong headed policy of crony capitalism by the energy, armaments, and financial elites has inhibited fundamental corrective economic activities involving investment in human resources and renewal of productive investment activities necessary to adapt to change and economic competition.

The truth is that the leaders of American capital have abandoned the territorial United States and its people and already begun a massive migration overseas in pursuit of short term gain at the expense of the nation's future. It isn't just an 11,000.00 per capita debt, I wish it was. This war represents the corruption and ruin of the social and economic futures of the overwhelming majority of Americans.

[Nothing Without Hope]

7. You are so right. Unfortunately. And then there is the effect of NOT

paying attention to critical matters like global warming, the escalating energy crisis, the increasing threat of nuclear war... The list feels endless. The world isn't standing still while Bush plays his murderous war games. The danger, the stakes are higher every hour.

[teryang]

8. No prospect of a competent reaction within a few years?

Those challenges are just the ones I had in mind.

There must be leadership to accept and to respond to these challenges. The failure to do so by the so called elected representatives of the people (who are bought and paid for) leaves a vacuum and little prospect for timely change.

I feel that the electoral process might not provide relief because of its corporate ownership and (electronic) lack of legitimacy.

I had hoped that a proxy crisis like the Plame affair would provide concerned elites with an excuse to jettison this administration like the watergate affair. This however doesn't seem to be happening. I'm afraid that only economic and military disaster will fill the bill.

[Nothing Without Hope]

9. Well, economic and military disaster are here and growing. There are

some signs that citizens are beginning to wake up. However, little substantive progress has been made yet toward correcting the machinery of election fraud - and without democracy, the criminals in power will just continue to glut themselves.

[RONSTOO]

31. truly

we cant afford it...do you have a good plan?

[Nothing Without Hope]

44. kick n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

10. kick n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

11. a kick for the afternoon crowd n/t

[DemoTex]

14. The Trillion-Dollar War with a tax cut.

Permanent war, permanent tax cut. Bad times ahead for us regular folks.

[Nothing Without Hope]

15. And the trillion dollars is such a minimum estimate in so many ways. n.t

[BeFree]

17. But...are we safe?

What is it that we fear? (Not we - them)

Do we fear another trade tower attack? A biological attack? Nukes?

Well, if that is our fear, then tell us what our occupation in Iraq is doing to make us safer.

That is the question needing an answer: How do our soldiers make us any safer as they patrol the streets of some far off desert land?

Wouldn't they be better deployed patrolling airports, shipyards and the border? Wouldn't that make America safer?

As far as I am concerned, b**h can declare victory in Iraq. Then our soldiers can leave those poor people alone and the free market system can repair their cities with the trillions of $ we will send them.

We broke it: We bought it. Best we get the bull out of the china shop anyway we can.

[Raster]

16. *'s ME folly is THE greatest fuckup of all times. Everything that

could go wrong, has gone wrong. Spectacurly. Seriously, we could not have fucked up the middle east any worse if we had deliberately set about doing so. The justification was false, the planning poor and the execution abysmal. All caution and common sense have been tossed to the wind on the greatest of gambles. And they--we--lost.

[Nothing Without Hope]

19. Not even a gamble. They KNEW there were no Iraqi WMDs, just as they

KNOW there are no homemade Iranian bombs for years to come. (I do wonder what the Bushies' buddy Pakistan might do.) It was Bush's grudge match, the neocon's dream of owning the Middle East, and war profiteering.

It's LIE LIE LIE all over again for "regime change" in Iran. Read the opening post and the links in the replies in this thread and you'll get the picture:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4252778
Thread title: Three extremely important threads on Iran nukes & the Bush agenda

[Raster]

24. no, the gamble was letting this group of jokers have a go...

they've bungled everything. the pnac crowd didn't get to this point where they could play RISK on an international level all by themselves. Some very powerful, weatherly and influential entities acquiesced, in one way or another, to invading Iraq. And once we invaded, there are only two outcomes. We/they would either succeed, which was highly unlikely, or they would create the biggest cluster fuck history has ever seen. well, you know the rest. From grossly underestimating resources--human and otherwise--to ignoring good intelligence, to forgetting history. The poorest of planning and the oh-so-ever-present stench of war profiteering. The repercussions from Iraq will echo for decades.

[Fire Walk With Me]

49. Not if it were perfectly planned. That kind of money...

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. It makes me sick to think what we COULD HAVE DONE with that money

And they say Amtrak is too expensive!

The government could have built high-speed rail connecting every major city in the U.S. for that price. They could have provided universal health care, for heaven sake.

[Nothing Without Hope]

20. Oh yes, so many things could have been done. Instead, we are paying

for corruption, horror and death and the US and the world are far LESS safe.

[Tin Man]

21. The absolute pinacle of irony.

The "fiscally conservative" Republicans are spending this country into bankruptcy.

The War in Iraq, the "oinker" Transportation Bill, CAFTA, tax cuts... and of course the Bankruptcy Reform Bill...

In four years we'll all be headed south-of-the-border to work in the maquiladoras as wage slaves...

[Im_Your_Huckleberry]

22. i'd like my money back, please.

[Nothing Without Hope]

23. kick n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

25. one more kick for the night. n/t

[paineinthearse]

26. Proud to give this #5

Sheesh, it "hard work" getting worthy posts onto the "greatest" page.

[Nothing Without Hope]

35. Thanks, Paine - and you're right about getting five votes. It's really

hard. I'm betting there will be more duplicate posts too - I've seen a number of them already. It takes a long time - if ever - to get to the Greatest, people don't see it, and they post again and again. And on a fast-moving forum like GD and to a lesser extent GD-P, many more kicks are needed to keep the thread even minimally visible. A lot of people are not going to bother when it's so much effort.

Wish we could come up with a good plan B to suggest to the admins.

[bleever]

27. Late night kick.

[paineinthearse]

28. Who is LINDA BILMES?

I did a wiki search and came up empty.

:shrug:

[Nothing Without Hope]

36. She's a former Commerce Dept official and a current Harvard teacher

Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce from 1999 to 2001, teaches budgeting and public finance at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

[serryjw]

29. Sorry, I don't have the $11,300.....will * pay it

for me and many other citizens?

[don954]

30. thats soooo Dr. Evil

One Trillion Dollars!
muhahahaha

[DemReadingDU]

32. Linda Bilmes was on C-Span Sat 8/20/05

The C-Span morning call-in show. I'm not sure if she was scheduled, or if she called in. My spouse directed me to watch it. Very interesting.

on edit: maybe it was just a discussion about her article in the NYT. I only was able to see the last minute or so of the program.

[whatelseisnew]

33. Here's a visual you can watch the dollars spent

http://www.costofwar.com/

You can also see cost per state, selected cities and compared to other programs such as pre-school, kids' health, public education, college scharships, public housing, world hunger, aids epidemic and world immunization.

[Blue_Tires]

34. i'd recommend if i could

[Nothing Without Hope]

37. Thanks. It takes so long to get to the Greatest Page where it can be seen

that there is very little time to recommend it once it's there.

Maybe we could ask that they change the rule so that the 24 hours for recommendation restarts if a thread manages to get to the Greatest. Doubt they'd agree. So a lot of good threads are not going to be seen.

[Swamp Rat]

38. Oops! I just tried to recommend it too.

:hi:

[Nothing Without Hope]

39. Thanks, SR. I think we should ask for more time to recommend the threads

AFTER they reach the Greatest Page. It now takes a long time to get there so that they become more visible, but readers can't respond once the 24 hrs from posting is up. This is a problem, and I think some good threads are going to go unseen because of it.

[Swamp Rat]

40. I agree.

If it requires more votes to reach the Greatest Page, then more time should be given to ascertain the quality of the post and to allow more exposure.

[Nothing Without Hope]

42. Exactly. This situation is a serious problem for DU. We need to write to

the admins and plead for them to give more time after posts reach the Greatest. It would make a lot of sense for a set time clock to start once they are there, because except for the initial few minutes after posting, when they are zipping down the Forums page, posts are basically invisible to most people until they hit the Greatest Page.

And General Discussion? I battled with that yesterday for a post I consider very important for multiple reasons. Never again. It's too much effort - and I'm not the only one that's going to feel like that. Some people are going to start regularly PMing their friends to pump up their posts, and that's bad too.

Here's the GD post and another GD-P post I put up yesterday. I hope you will find something useful in them. The GD post finally made it, but the others can't.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4404751
Thead title: THE LOUDEST CRY-LATimes: "Suicide Casts a Shadow on Conservation Battle"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2021361
Thread title: NYT op/ed on Republican PORK - PORK - PORK in Alaska - YOU'RE paying!

Oh, and your stamp art is a hoot! And I see you spotted that great "Providense" thread. The Moran boy now has buddies! :rofl:

[Inland]

41. The rebuttal:

It won't cost more than $999,999,999,* and therefore this war is worth the price.





* not including funds disappearing and "bad accounting", unauthorized funds transferred from other budgets, and "Mission Accomplished" ceremonies. Estimate through 2010 only. Iran invasion not included. Reality may provide a different result.

[Nothing Without Hope]

43. Unfortunately, the rebuttal we hear with the help of the Poodle Press is

all lies - the Iraq War is supposedly making us "safe" and "stopping the terra-ists." We NEVER hear of the true costs, human and otherwise, and we NEVER hear - except in alternative media and a few brave editorials - that the whole travesty has been a murderous fraud from the start and has fomented terrorism and hatred like nothing before.

[Cha]

45. The people who wanted this

war should pay for it!! Fuck $10,000 per household.

I'm not paying for Soldiers to be killed and Iraqis to be slaughtered!

[oscar111]

46. 4 Billion ends hmlessness: 300 B ends US poverty: 13 B ends US hunger

all easy to do with the dollars being wasted on the war plus the taxcuts for the rich.

all of the title, sum up to

317 Billion/yr

taxcuts were 35O Billion/yr
war is running at ? 2OO Billion/yr

sums to 55O Billion /yr sucked out of the tax pool and squandered on nothingness.

That 55O Billion would easily cover the end of all US poverty, hunger and homelessness -- 317 Billion.

[Nothing Without Hope]

47. kick for a useful article n/t

[Nothing Without Hope]

48. These figures would surprise most Americans who still find a way to trust

Bush, I believe. They need to hear about it.

[Roland99]

50. But funding the joke, NCLB, can't happen.

Funding nationalized healthcare can't happen.
Funding alternative fuel research can't happen.
Funding cancer/AIDS/stem cell research can't happen.
Funding NASA can't happen.


But, giving tax breaks and credits to oil companies? No problem.

Giving huge concessions to the drug companies in the form of the Medicare Prescription Drug Bill? No problem.

Giving Federal funds to religious groups/churches? No problem.

[Politicub]

51. Send a bill to all of the war supporters

Tell them to put thier money where thier mouth is. It give those fucking chickenhawk morons a slap in the face with reality.

They are so afraid that a single mom will get a food stamp paid for with their precious dollar, let them experience paying for Bush's folly instead of placing the burden on the back's of our children.

[Samantha]

52. True, but think of all the money Bush* is saving on Larry Lindsay's salary