Do You Realize How Many Chicken Nuggets You Could Buy for $2 Billion?; or On the Cost of the War in Iraq

An article by Ron Hutcheson of the McClatchy-Tribune news service appeared in The [Cleveland] Plain Dealer today. The article, which is in the Forum section of the paper, hits you over the head with it's headline - $500 billion appears in huge, red letters in the middle of the page. The article makes its message clear - with the estimated $124 billion price tag of the war funding bill looming large, the total direct cost of the War in Iraq is about to reach a half-trillion dollars. If one takes into account the estimated costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for 2008, the total costs to date of those wars will reach $719 billion. That makes these wars, the two major fronts in the Global War on Terror, the second most expensive conflict in American history. By the time Bush leaves office (624 days and counting), the only war to outpace the War on Terror will be World War II. Granted, WWII cost $5.4 trillion, but I guess Bush is right to compare Iraq to WWII in at least one regard. (read the whole article here).

Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times wrote a column on October 24 laying out the estimated total cost of the war, including both direct and indirect costs. The $500 billion number only accounts for the amount of taxpayer dollars that are going to fund the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But far more money is being wasted than just this. For example, more than 3,000 American soldiers have suffered severe head trauma in Iraq. These men and women will require intensive medical care for years; the estimated amount will range "from $600,000 to $5 million per person." We will also have to cover the future medical and mental health issues of the men and women fighting in the desert. I have seen statistics that more than 20% of men and around 1/3 of women coming home suffer from PTSD or some other sort of mental health issue. These costs will continue to add up and pressure a Veterans' Administration that is already stretched to its breaking point. (read Kristof's column here).

When one takes these estimations into consideration, along with the economic consequences of the war (such as the increases in oil prices worldwide), the TOTAL cost of the war adds up to a staggering amount. Joseph Stiglitz, last year's Nobel Prize winner in economics, calculated that the war will cost $2 trillion. That's TRILLION with capital T. Even two economists from the conservative American Enterprise Institute reached a figure of $1 trillion.

Let's try to put some of that into perspective, shall we? For every second we spend in Iraq, we spend $6,300. That's $380,000 a minute; $22,800,000 per hour; $547,200,000 per day; $3,830,400,000 per week; $16,416,000,000 per month; $196,992,000,000 per year. As Kristof explains, $2 trillion would be four times the amount needed to insure all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It comes to more than $18,000 per American household.

Using the numbers provided by The Cost of War website (courtesy of the National Priorities Project, find it here at costofwar.com) and my math - the website goes by the current direct cost of Iraq, which is about $425,000,000, so I multiply everything by 4 to get the cost up to $1.7 trillion - I have compiled a few more items for perspective sake. That money could have been used to provide 82,124, 560 students with full, four-year tuition to a public university. We could have hired 29,358,428 public school teachers for a year. We could have put 224,380,188 children through a full year of Head Start.

We could afford to pay off the portions of our national debt owned by Japan ($644.3 billion) and China ($349.6 billion) almost twice. That could cover 22% of the total national debt, which sits at around $8.6 trillion. For you supply-siders out there, that would be just about enough to pay the entire cost of the Bush tax cuts over the next decade.

So, what does an ill-conceived war cost? How about 3,350 lives and counting. Or maybe you would like to think about it in dollar figures, try the equivalent of the entire US national budget for a year. What can you buy for $2 trillion? A better life for millions.