| The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan group of number crunchers, says Bush's new plans to have a long-term Korea-style presence in Iraq would cost over $2 trillion. That's apparently using conservative estimates.
Damn. That's a lot of money.
But it's probably a significant understatement, because it is just evaluating the budgetary impact of the war itself -- not any of the costs associated with that presence.
In early 2006, a top budget expert and one of the world's leading economists released a report evaluating the cost of the war in terms of real long-term impacts -- economic impacts, cost of debt associated with the war, health and disability responsibilities resulting from Iraq, etc. -- and at that point, they concluded that $2 trillion was a likely real figure for the cost of the war. When they made that argument, the war's cost had been $251 billion, so they said the real cost was 8 times what the budgetary cost was.
Realistically, I'm thinking this whole enterprise will cost us a lot more than $2 trillion. And if we stay in Iraq for two generations, that number will skyrocket.
Update -- This explains why the cornerstone of Mike Lange's fiscal proposals is to end the ongoing engagement in Iraq. There's really no other way to cut spending significantly right now. |
