Baltimore
I remember the day in 2003 when Larry Lindsey, then President Bush’s CEA chair, said the Iraq War could cost as much as $200 billion. While then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld dismissed Lindsey’s conjecture as “baloney,” I remember thinking that it was a dangerous underestimate.
Surely, I recall thinking, this war would exceed $1 trillion when one honestly considered the costs of long-term nation-building, veterans’ health-care needs, armed forces re-equipping and inevitable oil-price escalations. I worried back then that oil prices could climb past $50 a barrel for several years and that we would be stuck in Iraq for 15-20 years. I was wrong on oil, now priced at a staggering $103 a barrel, but I will regrettably stick to my guns on the tenure issue – five years and counting. Of course, none of this speaks to the horror of so many lives and limbs lost.
Lindsey was fired for attempting to calibrate the truth. After all, others above his pay grade were claiming at the time that the war would cost only $50 billion to $60 billion. Now Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes suggest in their new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, that the real cost to U.S. taxpayers is $3 trillion and rising. They assert that costs these high coupled with tax cuts and staggering deficits have contributed mightily to our economic crisis. Their views also remind us how ludicrous it is when politicians, pollsters and pundits suggest somehow that we the people are now more interested in the economy than we are in this war. The two are and have always been inseparable.
I remember the day in 2003 when Larry Lindsey, then President Bush’s CEA chair, said the Iraq War could cost as much as $200 billion. While then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld dismissed Lindsey’s conjecture as “baloney,” I remember thinking that it was a dangerous underestimate.
Surely, I recall thinking, this war would exceed $1 trillion when one honestly considered the costs of long-term nation-building, veterans’ health-care needs, armed forces re-equipping and inevitable oil-price escalations. I worried back then that oil prices could climb past $50 a barrel for several years and that we would be stuck in Iraq for 15-20 years. I was wrong on oil, now priced at a staggering $103 a barrel, but I will regrettably stick to my guns on the tenure issue – five years and counting. Of course, none of this speaks to the horror of so many lives and limbs lost.
Lindsey was fired for attempting to calibrate the truth. After all, others above his pay grade were claiming at the time that the war would cost only $50 billion to $60 billion. Now Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes suggest in their new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, that the real cost to U.S. taxpayers is $3 trillion and rising. They assert that costs these high coupled with tax cuts and staggering deficits have contributed mightily to our economic crisis. Their views also remind us how ludicrous it is when politicians, pollsters and pundits suggest somehow that we the people are now more interested in the economy than we are in this war. The two are and have always been inseparable.