War Costs: Even Worse Than You Think

The federal government will spend $2.4 trillion by 2017 for waging the "War on Terror" in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was the most mind-boggling statistic to come from the Congressional Budget Office's estimate released today on the rapidly rising costs of Bush's war.

The number assumes that the current 200,00 U.S. troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan will be reduced to 75,000 by 2013 and remain at that level by 2017. At a hearing of the House Budget Committee on Wednesday, CBO Director Peter Orzag described just how much money we're talking about:

-$11 billion a month is being spent in funding for Afghanistan and Iraq-- of which $9 billion goes to Iraq. In 2003, President Bush's Budget Director, Mitch Daniels, estimated the cost of the Iraq War would be $50 to $60 billion.

-Of the $2.4 trillion figure, $1.7 trillion is the projected war costs over the next 10 years. Nearly $900 billion of this is for actually fighting the wars, while $700 billion will be used to pay off interest on the money borrowed to finance the wars.

-Bush is asking for $196 billion in war funding in next years' budget. This is more money than the total budgets for the Department of Agriculture, Justice Department, FBI and Environmental Protection Agency.

The CBO did offer an alternative, withdrawal-based budget scenario where by 2010 there would only be 30,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This would bring war costs to $570 billion by 2017.

At the same time, the CBO's projection is not even a worst-case scenario. "This doesn't consider if Vice-Preisdent Cheney is successful in invading Iran," pointed out Texas Democratic Representative Lloyd Doggett. "This assumes troop levels will stay the same and then go lower." Orzag also admitted that it's hard to estimate the full veterans health-care costs, particularly in treating Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome.

During the hearing, Orzag was intent on pointing out to the committee that the "emergency funding" Bush keeps requesting for the Iraq War really isn't emergency funding, noting that a lot of this money goes to buying equipment. "The purpose of 'emergency funding' isn't to replace a 1990 tank with a high-technology 2007 or 2008 tank," Orzag said.

Wisconsin's Paul Ryan, who spent most of the hearing as the only Republican there and only defender of the Bush policy, also declared, "We should be putting these [war] costs in our base budget."

Democratic members made much of the absence of Republicans and the fact that Bush Administration officials declined to testify about the war costs. "Their absence speaks even louder than words and statistics," Doggett huffed.

"Someday, somebody has to pay for this war and that's going to be the children of the wounded," Massachusetts Democratic Representative Jim McGovern noted. "I only wish the President was listening." McGovern is one of several Democrats proposing a tax to pay for the war that Orzag called "unsustainable" in budgetary terms.

Comments (23)

1. I thought that the oil resources were going to pay for the whole fiasco according to Bushco. I guess they forgot to mention that after all the resources were divided up amongst the worlds major oil companies, that taxpayers would be left holding the bag while they chuckled all the way to the bank. Thanks boys....you have single handedly orchestrated the largest transfer of taxpayer dollars into private hands in the history of the world....you have lots to be proud of.

   Posted by jpolston at 10/24/2007 @ 3:33pm

2. Mr Blake, Mr Blake, Mr Blake.....(sigh)...

   As HAPPY and LVLIBERTY (and other neo-cons) will tell you...no problem!

   We can spend TRILLIONS "off the books" on the GWOT and never even have to worry about paying it back!

   Posted by Mask at 10/24/2007 @ 4:03pm

3. Bush's math isn't fuzzy, it's completely beyond fuzzy and out of sight. Bush and Cheney and the rest of the neocons have their heads shoved so far up their asses that they can't see how much money we're bleeding into Iraq with zero return. For guys who are supposed to be businessmen they, don't seem to be able to add.

   Posted by Wolfgang1 at 10/24/2007 @ 4:57pm

4. "For guys who are supposed to be businessmen they, don't seem to be able to add."

   Posted by WOLFGANG1 10/24/2007 @ 4:57pm

   Bullshit. Their math skills are fine.

   Re-read the last sentence of JPOLSTON's post.

   Posted by drhammer at 10/24/2007 @ 7:03pm

5. Posted by FRANKGRITS 10/24/2007 @ 4:31pm

   Another one of Franks gems..right out of 4th grade logic...it is so painfully obvious that higher education, logic, and simple reasoning were never introduced to Frank..sounds like GED material to me...but I'll bet he did stay at a Holiday INN Express one night.

   Posted by JoMa at 10/24/2007 @ 8:17pm

6. For the educational benefit of MASK....

   February 5, 2007

   PAGE ONE

   GUNS AND BUTTER

   How War's Expense Didn't Strain Economy

   By DEBORAH SOLOMON

   February 5, 2007; Page A1

   WASHINGTON -- Since President Bush took office, he's boosted annual defense spending by 50% -- including $500 billion over five years for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and doubled spending on homeland security. At the same time, he's cut taxes, expanded Medicare to cover prescription drugs, approved $100 billion to clean up after Gulf Coast hurricanes, and signed bills that spend a little more each year on domestic programs.

   For years, critics said it couldn't last, backed by some historical precedent: President Johnson is blamed by many for triggering inflation in the 1970s by spending on both guns and butter. But this time, it's been nearly painless. Inflation is in check. The federal budget deficit is down from its 2004 peak, and rests near its historical average of 2% of gross domestic product, a measure of the nation's total output. Long-term interest rates are relatively low.

   What's Mr. Bush's secret? Ingredient one: strong revenue growth driven by an economy distinguished by surging profits and rising incomes at the top, which are taxed more heavily than incomes at the bottom. Ingredient two: tax cuts and spending increases, which arrived when the U.S. economy needed a boost. Ingredient three, and perhaps the most significant: the willingness of foreigners to lend to the U.S., which finances the budget deficit without pushing up interest rates at a time when Americans don't save very much.

   "This situation is what you'd call an exorbitant privilege," says Menzie Chinn, a University of Wisconsin economist. "We've gotten a pretty good deal so far."

   No one knows when this bonanza might end,......

   Posted by Happy at 10/24/2007 @ 9:31pm

7. Posted by HAPPY 10/24/2007 @ 9:31pm

   HAPP....your neat little article talks about the "federal budget" deficit.

   Is spending on Iraq ON the federal budget? Do you REALLY (in your blind ideological mind) think that the TWO-POINT-FOUR TRILLION dollars we'll spend (maybe) for the next TEN YEARS will be "grown out of"?

   Or when we finally have to pay the taxes to pay for this debacle, will you bitch and moan about the financially SANE and....FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE folks that had to pick up the mess guys like you helped support?

   Posted by Mask at 10/24/2007 @ 9:58pm

8. 2.4 trillion, on the credit card... to kill

   and god says thou shall not kill.

   yet the very same hamsters, who quite remarkably claim to be Christian (even though everybody knows they're not) suddenly start crying poor when we pass the same plate around... to heal children.

   and Jesus loves the little children.

   Posted by Will C. at 10/24/2007 @ 10:26pm

9. too bad the pretenders to his faith don't.

   Posted by Will C. at 10/24/2007 @ 10:26pm

10. Posted by MASK 10/24/2007 @ 9:58pm

    I told you before, I don't know and I don't care! The money spent fighting overseas have brought tangible security and prosperity, even if it has been weighed towards the top.

    The $2.4 T for the next ten years is a projection based on pure speculations....I used to do some of this stuff for a living...financial spreadsheets....junk `science'....but MBAs' get big bucks to produce them! The only war planning (as vs. longterm R&D like space exploration or drug developments) that is worthy of serious attention, IMO, is for 2 or less years!

    Leaving the Boomer-associated social spendings out of the picture, I have no doubt we can handle paying for your so-called "debacle" IF we can keep our economy growing and employment high....interspersed just by minor AND short cyclical recessions. What I AM concerned are recessions caused by structural changes to the economy led by tax & social policy changes......imagine the lost output/GDP and outright cost to support 10 million unemployed for long periods of time!

    Posted by Happy at 10/24/2007 @ 10:31pm

11. I for one look forward to the recession waiting for us in the future which will be precipitated by hamsterland putting all their war spending on the countries credit card.

    Not so much because I'm a fan of recessions, but because I'm going to fall off the chair and roll around on the floor laughing when the personal responsibility crowd over at the conservative sleaze media start screaming at the top of their lungs that their recession is the fault of democrats, liberals and all that public spending on our kids schooling and health care.

    Bwah Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

    and how we now need to demonstrate fiscal responsibilty and cut back all that spending on the kiddees

    Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

    and that the Hamsters are just the people the country needs to make the tough choices ...

    ha haH Ah Ah Ah ah ah ahHa Ha Ha ha hah AH Ah ha haH aH aH AH Ha Ah Ah Ah Ah HA Ha

    Posted by Will C. at 10/24/2007 @ 10:56pm

12. see... it's started already.

    Posted by Will C. at 10/24/2007 @ 10:56pm

13. MADDENING, ISN'T IT?...

    I agree....

    Posted by w_m_bear at 10/24/2007 @ 11:55pm

14. Someone needs to ask Pres. Bush: What in the HELL he'll do, if attacking IRAN results in a Terrorist Strike on Iraqi or Saudi OIL WELLS, for example?

    What would America do, if all the OIL WELLS in the Middle East were GLOWING RED with RADIOACTIVITY? Our Military doesn't just "travel on its stomach"; it needs OIL too! On the "Homefront", America would grind to a halt, like a whale stranded on desert sand, without Middle East oil.

    If the thought of having Bush & Cheney in charge wasn't such a SOBERING & scary prospect, I could joke about their increasingly bizarre "WWIII" rhetoric as just the ravings of a Lame Duck president trying to shore up their core right-wing base.

    I know our top Military PROFESSIONAL Leaders are worried sick. You just don't see a parade of Generals speaking out publicly, trying to warn us, it's unprecedented! But Bush won't listen.

    Congress is filled with a LOT of senile old living corpse-sicles, clinging to their "Seats of Power", who just want to stay in power or get elected President in 2008. Impotent.

    "Offensive acts come back upon the evildoer, like dust that is thrown against the wind." --- Buddha

    Posted by AtomicWarBaby at 10/25/2007 @ 06:13am

15. "For guys who are supposed to be businessmen they, don't seem to be able to add."

    Posted by WOLFGANG1 10/24/2007 @ 4:57pm

    Bullshit. Their math skills are fine.

    Re-read the last sentence of JPOLSTON's post.

    Posted by DRHAMMER 10/24/2007 @ 7:03pm

    DRHAMMER, I was just pointing out Bush's 2000 election lies about Al Gore's fuzzy math. I know very well that Bush, Cheney and the rest of the money grabbing, power hungry zealots know exactly what they are doing and that about three quarters of the fools voting for them do not.

    Posted by Wolfgang1 at 10/25/2007 @ 06:51am

16. Leaving the Boomer-associated social spendings out of the picture, I have no doubt we can handle paying for your so-called "debacle" IF we can keep our economy growing and employment high....interspersed just by minor AND short cyclical recessions. What I AM concerned are recessions caused by structural changes to the economy led by tax & social policy changes......imagine the lost output/GDP and outright cost to support 10 million unemployed for long periods of time!

    Posted by HAPPY 10/24/2007 @ 10:31pm

    HAPPY, Which economy are you talking about? The wallstreet economy, or the economy that middle class America has to deal with because they are not one and the same.

    Wall street applauds outsourcing, streamlining corporations (cutting jobs and putting the thumbscrews down on workers). If you hadn't noticed, outsourcing jobs is literally investing in other countries, not the U.S. Sure, the immediate results are profits, but when those countries start producing the same product legally or illegally and can then outproduct the Amercian companies, who wins then?

    The fat cats on wall street and the investment folks skimming off the top will always do fine, it's the rest of us Americans losing our shirts off your profit off anything that moves motivations and when the music stops, you assholes will just move to other countries while we have to pick up the pieces. Skilled labor jobs are the ones being outsourced to China and India. If you don't believe that, take a look at the technical job market. More students are going into business than technology fields in the U.S. right now and there is a damn good reason for it. Unfortunately, businessmen don't really produce anything, they hire others to produce for them. But what happens when we (the United States) aren't producing anything anymore?

    Posted by Wolfgang1 at 10/25/2007 @ 07:04am

17. No, HAPPY....you're contradicting yourself....you say

    "I told you before, I don't know and I don't care!"----Posted by HAPPY 10/24/2007 @ 10:31pm

    Yet when this was first posted and I mentioned you and your view on it, you posted...The federal budget deficit is down from its 2004 peak, and rests near its historical average of 2% of gross domestic product, a measure of the nation's total output.----Posted by HAPPY 10/24/2007 @ 9:31pm

    If you "dont' care", why did you feel it necessary to post an apologia for the federal deficit???

    It was only AFTER I noted that Iraq war spending is NOT part of the federal budget, that you went with "I don't care!", meaning that you're "We'll grow our way out of the deficit" post wasn't necessary, since YOU DON'T CARE if we grow our way out of deficts!

    Posted by Mask at 10/25/2007 @ 09:07am

18. and Jesus loves the little children.

    Posted by WILL C. 10/24/2007 @ 10:26pm

    Yet the hamsters won't let them have health insurance....

    Posted by leftofcenter at 10/25/2007 @ 11:02am

19. If you "dont' care", why did you feel it necessary to post an apologia for the federal deficit???

    Posted by MASK 10/25/2007 @ 09:07am

    I post to educate others (& in vain hope of you)....and to answer your often-repeated questions.....your mind is more made up than most! I do recall that what I care about, is the direction of our deficits--very positive in recent year, even better than that Fe. `07 WSJ article I posted yesterday! It's the Economy (& security), MASKPID!

    Posted by Happy at 10/25/2007 @ 11:29am

20. These numbers are staggeringly large and reveal just how much damage the Bush administration has done, but the Iraq War would have been wrong even if we had been able to magically do it for free. The expenditures will cripple us for decades, but the moral wrong of the war comes in the form of all the killing we did, and the lies upon which that killing was based.

    Posted by BlueSpark at 10/25/2007 @ 12:24pm

21. I do recall that what I care about, is the direction of our deficits--Posted by HAPPY 10/25/2007 @ 11:29am

    Okay so you "care about the direction of the deficit"...

    but "DON'T care about the money spent off budget" cuz it's "keeping us safe"?!?!?!?!

    Posted by Mask at 10/25/2007 @ 12:46pm

22. And where is this money going to come from?

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hale-stewart/has-the-us-reached-its-de_b_6 9458.html

    Posted by notinKansas at 10/25/2007 @ 10:57pm

23. Trillions of dollars? Who can picture what such a large number means? Not I.

    I can easily picture what ten of something (say bricks) looks like; same with a hundred; a thousand bricks? I'd have some trouble guessing whether a pile of bricks contained one thousand or two thousand. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? A million? I haven't a clue whether it would take a hundred thousand, a half million or one million bricks to fill the room I'm in. Sure, I could take measurements and pull out my calculator, but that's not picturing the number; that's just abstraction, which is exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

    Some time ago, I tried to put large numbers into perspective. Here's an image I can begin to envision. I know how long a minute is. I can picture the number of minutes in a day, and days in a year. Here's what I came to:

    Since the day Jesus was born (assuming such a person existed), there have been a touch over one billion minutes. Wow! A billion is sure a big number.

    So, if Jesus had decided to get a "good" job instead of going into the preaching business, and he earned about $60 per hour, and he worked 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, he'd have earned one billion dollars to date.

    Bill Gates and Warren Buffet have something like fifty times that much hoarded away. But a trillion is a thousand times that much.

    So, for Jesus to have earned enough to pay for a 4.7 trillion dollar war, he'd have to have earned $282,000 dollars per hour, 24 hours per day for 2,000 years!

    The question of whether Jesus would have chosen to spend all his earnings on a war against Babylon, I still can't picture ;-)

    p.s. I don't mean to be a "hit and run" poster. Since I don't earn "godly" sums, I have to work a lot, and since I don't read postings while at work (damned Puritans and their accursed work ethic), and do a lot of stuff besides work, I don't visit the Nation's postings as frequently as some of y'all. If I've offended anyone by not following threads consistantly after posting, I apologize.

    Posted by Radscal at 10/29/2007 @ 2:01pm