Just came across this article which implies that the cost of the war in Iraq is "only" about a couple of billion dollars a week. I think I gave a much higher figure in one of my posts, but still a couple billion a week is not to be sneezed at.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/business/17leonhardt.html?ei=5090&en=7f221bfce7a6408c&ex=1326690000&pagewanted=printThe source is the good ol' New York Times, which I've been castigating as an Establishment whore for quite some time, so I'm willing to believe that the$2 billion per week may be an underestimate. However, the article makes it clear that the figure represents only the direct costs - - <<The operation itself ? the helicopters, the tanks, the fuel needed to run them, the combat pay for enlisted troops, the salaries of reservists and contractors, the rebuilding of Iraq ? is costing more than $300 million a day, estimates Scott Wallsten, an economist in Washington. >>
The story goes on to review various estimates of total cost - - some economists say $1 trillion, some say $2 trillion.
The "soft costs" or "hidden costs" are pretty speculative, that is the reason for the big discrepancy.
<<The war has also guaranteed some big future expenses. Replacing the hardware used in Iraq and otherwise getting the United States military back into its prewar fighting shape could cost $100 billion.
And if this war?s veterans receive disability payments and medical care at the same rate as veterans of the first gulf war, their health costs will add up to $250 billion. If the disability rate matches Vietnam?s, the number climbs higher. Either way, Ms. Bilmes says, ?It?s like a miniature Medicare.?
<<In economic terms, you can think of these medical costs as the difference between how productive the soldiers would have been as, say, computer programmers or firefighters and how productive they will be as wounded veterans. In human terms, you can think of soldiers like Jason Poole, a young corporal profiled in The New York Times last year. Before the war, he had planned to be a teacher. After being hit by a roadside bomb in 2004, he spent hundreds of hours learning to walk and talk again, and he now splits his time between a community college and a hospital in Northern California.>>
As I see it, the difference between the U.S.A. and its economic rivals is that while the U.S.A. is sinking huge funds into the totally non-productive activities of modern warfare, the rivals have equivalent amounts of cash on hand (what they are NOT putting into military adventures) available for such things as early childhood education, preventive health care, etc. The article makes this part of it more concrete.
The U.S. is clearly a nation in decline. It is losing its competitive edge, losing its greatest asset (human beings) to poverty, ignorance, poor health, all preventable by social-welfare spending from which the U.S. is blocked by both ideology and the fiscal drain represented by the war on Iraq. Its rivals suffer from no such handicap. If I were an economist, i would probably have no trouble demonstrating that this slide began in the Viet Nam War, when huge expenditures bearing no conceivable benefit or return had to be poured down the bottomless pit that was Viet Nam. The cost of caring for crippled soldiers is probably still with you from that war. And now the paradox of improved battlefield medicine saving many more lives, thereby adding disproportionately to the burden on the system overall.
The funniest thing about this, however, is the classical Pentagon underquote of the cost of the war - - $50 billion. Apparently, when one honest Pentagon official revised it up to $200 billion, Bush fired him. Partially for his honesty. It's in the article. Still, some folks still have faith in the Pentagon. When its current occupants tell you that the surge is "working" and they just need more time, most people seem to go along with this. Gotta trust your own soldiers. (The fact that these guys are five-star morons, all of whom apparently missed the cost estimates by the gap between $50 billion and $1 or $2 trillionl, is somehow glossed over in neocon eyes - - trust this guy, he's a general, go with whatever he says.) Well, there are still plenty of idiots left in the states, and they go on peddling their idiocy no matter how often they've been proven wrong in the past.
