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.
$12 billion a month? That’s $400 million a day!
Alms for the poor! Alms for the poor!
It is Hell to be so poor we can’t afford universal health care.
This seems to follow the Republican logic that we will never surrender to defeat by Osama; we are perfectly capable of destroying our own country on our own, thank you.
didn’t georgie say somthing about iWaq being free?
didn’t georgie say somthing about iWaq being free?
come to think of it, i think he said ‘fwee’, which might just be true.