June 2, 2008
Links 19 (The Cost of War)
I'm starting to go crazy (and the shit hasn't even hit the fan yet -- that'll probably happen later this week). I won't be doing any online whining or venting here like I used to do, but posts may continue to be sporadic. (I have thought about starting an anonymous blogspot or livejournal blog as an outlet, though. If I do, I'll post notice here and I'll give the address to a select few of you.)
Anyway, let's soldier on with the link dump... Today's topic is the Cost of War. Specifically, the cost of U.S. misadventures in Iraq. "Cost" here is in the economic sense -- this is, needless to say, a fairly narrow view of the costs of war, but it has the virtue of being easy to quantify ...relatively easy, at least. There are plenty of estimates, but the general consensus is something like, um, a lot.
1. Last year, when the Bush Administration was requesting more funding for the war, the total official cost - just up to that point - came to $611.5 billion. This led many people to ask What can $611 billion buy? The answers were sobering.
2. Later, the Joint Economic Committee concluded that the Iraq war would cost $1.3 trillion - that's $1,300,000,000,000 - by 2009, and the combined cost of Iraq & Afghanistan could reach $3.5 trillion by 2017. They factored in the cost of borrowing money to pay for the war, lost productivity, higher oil prices, cost of healthcare for veterans, etc. At that price, the cost to a family of four would be more than $20,000 between 2002 and 2008.
3. But the cost is actually higher than that, pointed out economics professor Tyler Cowen in the Washington Post. One needs to factor in opportunity cost (more about opportunity cost). His article points out wasted opportunities, hidden costs, and the 'fruitless investment' Iraq has been. (Not to mention the human cost, which is of course incalculable.)
4. Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz arrived at a conservative figure of $3 trillion to the U.S. and another $3 trillion to the rest of the world. Can you even imagine what else we could have done with that money? Some could have been applied to actually protecting the U.S., and the rest could have been spent on energy independence, environmental and social issues, etc. The list is huge. Even those who argue that manned space exploration is a boondoggle would probably agree it would've been a better use of the money - and for that much money, we could have embarked not just on an exploration program of Mars, but we could've practically colonized the place.
5. So. An enormous economic cost for a war that, according to the National Intelligence Estimate, has fueled the terror threat.
None of this is terribly new or surprising, though. In many ways, the current terror threat stems directly from the Cold War, another simply incredible waste of resources. I recall a speech delivered by Carl Sagan twenty years ago for the rededication of the Gettysburg memorial. (A copy can be found on the History Channel site or in the book Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History; a copy updated by co-author Ann Druyan is in Sagan's posthumous publication Billions & Billions.)
In the speech, Sagan pointed out the $10 trillion spent by the U.S. waging the Cold War, more than a third of which was spent during the Reagan years. (And it never really stopped... Druyan notes in the update in "Billions & Billions" that the Clinton defense budget in post-Cold War 1995 was $30 billion higher than Nixon's defense budget in the height of the Cold War.) Sagan wondered what else we could have done with, say, half of that $10 trillion:
What else could the United States have done with that money (not all of it, because prudent defense is, of course, necessary — but, say, half of it)? For a little over $5 trillion, skillfully applied, we could have made major progress toward eliminating hunger, homelessness, infectious disease, illiteracy, ignorance, poverty, and safeguarding the environment—not just in the United States but worldwide. We could have helped make the planet agriculturally self-sufficient and removed many of the causes of violence and war. And this could have been done with enormous benefit to the American economy. We could have made deep inroads into the national debt. For less than a percent of that money, we could have mustered a long-term international program of manned exploration to Mars. Prodigies of human inventiveness in art, architecture, medicine, and science could be supported for decades with a tiny fraction of that money. The technological and entrepreneurial opportunities would have been prodigious.
02 Jun 8:01 | Link | Category: Current Events, Link Dump '08, Politics, Site/Life News