The Funny Farm
Where life is beautiful all the time and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats...
Adventures of a Basic Force For Good in Our TimeTM
Sunday, 6 Sweltring 2007
Hey, he's not around any more, and even though it's a dirty job sifting through Reich wing disinformation, somebody's got to do it!
My first offering is tentatively titled Fuzzy Math:
A priority of mine in my budget will be paying down national debt. And yet, after setting priorities, there's still money left over. And so while we're concerned about the federal budget, I'm also concerned about the budget of people such as the Yahngs, who are here standing next to me.
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The Pentagon has estimated a one-time cost for an Iraq war of about $50 billion -- about 0.5 percent of GDP -- and O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution has estimated the war could carry a one-time price tag of between $30 billion and $50 billion. But occupying a post-war Iraq and helping it rebuild could cost between $5 billion and $20 billion per year, O'Hanlon said, with the costs shrinking with time.
James Phillips, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said he thought this annual post-war cost estimate sounded a little high. "Once the [initial] conflict is over, Iraq is such an oil-rich nation, it can finance its own reconstruction," he said. "We would have to pay the costs of deploying forces, fuel, ammunition, etc.; but some of those would have to be paid regardless of where the troops were based." |
The Bush administration is refusing to produce any estimate of the possible cost of war and rebuilding in Iraq, which a series of outside studies have placed at anywhere from $50 billion to more than a trillion dollars.
The White House maintains that any estimate now would be no more than a guess, since the timing and length or war, and the duration and nature of post-war peacekeeping and reconstruction, are unknown. |
Gen. Tommy R. Franks said today that violence and uncertainty in Iraq made it unlikely that troop levels would be reduced "for the foreseeable future," and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nearly doubled the estimated military costs there to $3.9 billion a month.
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Congress expects the White House to request as much as $100 billion this year for war and related costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, congressional officials say.
It would be the third and largest Iraq-related budget request from the White House yet, and it could push the war's costs over $200 billion — far above initial White House estimates of $50 billion-$60 billion. So far, the Iraq war has cost about $130 billion, according to the White House's Office of Management and Budget. |
George W. Bush has turned out to be one of the most free-spending presidents on record, even after discounting the effects of the Iraq War and post-9/11 homeland security requirements. Apparently, there is no pork-barrel program so egregiously unjustified that he won't sign it into law. Amazingly, he is the first president since John Quincy Adams to serve a full term without vetoing anything.
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The cost of the war in Iraq will reach $320 billion after the expected passage next month of an emergency spending bill currently before the Senate, and that total is likely to more than double before the war ends, the Congressional Research Service estimated this week.
The analysis, distributed to some members of Congress on Tuesday night, provides the most official cost estimate yet of a war whose price tag will rise by nearly 17 percent this year. Just last week, independent defense analysts looking only at Defense Department costs put the total at least $7 billion below the CRS figure. |
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The war in Iraq could ultimately cost well over a trillion dollars -- at least double what has already been spent -- including the long-term costs of replacing damaged equipment, caring for wounded troops, and aiding the Iraqi government, according to a new government analysis.
The United States has already allocated more than $500 billion on the day-to-day combat operations of what are now 190,000 troops and a variety of reconstruction efforts. In a report to lawmakers yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that even under the rosiest scenario -- an immediate and substantial reduction of troops -- American taxpayers will feel the financial consequences of the war for at least a decade. |
[Editors' Note: this entry has been cross-posted at the American Street]