If you are American you have to go and read CostOfWar.com. If the eventual cost of the war in Iraq is really 2.2 Trillion, supposedly a modest estimate, just what has America gained from that vast expenditure? Was Bin Laden caught? Is America safer? Has American justice and democracy been held up as a shining beacon for the world to aspire to? A war without an exit, no, no and no.

Current cost is 240 Billion USD:

How many teachers could 240 Billion USD have bought?

How many kids could have been fully funded through college for 240 Billion USD?

How much public housing could have been funded by 240 Billion USD?

If you’d have paid each Iraqi 5 million USD, would it have been cheaper than going to war? Just curious, I’m betting it would, not that that removes Saddam but you get the drift.

Of course I reccommend this website for everyone else too, but I wonder how well known the cost of the war is in America. It is costing the UK millions, but nothing like the scale of the American spending.

The cost is spiralling so high that the Shrub Bush is cutting other programs to continue funding the war. Whoever the next president is the USA is heading into a depression. This repayments for the deficit will cripple America for years.

The President has now submitted a “guns over butter” budget to Congress that increases Pentagon spending to $440 billion, while taking away funds from social services at home and development assistance abroad. One of the great curiosities of this huge sum is that it does not include funding for the wars we are actually fighting. Those are appropriated separately — this year, the White House will reportedly be asking for another $120 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly equal to what it spent in 2005.
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Last month, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard’s Linda Bilmes released a report that took a wider view. Hinting at the human cost of the occupation — which, of course, requires its own ghastly page in the ledger of wartime accounting — the report factored in the government-assigned “value of statistical life” for troops killed in combat. (It did not include the loss of Iraqi lives.) It tallied items such as the costs of health care for wounded veterans, increased recruitment spending for a hard-up Pentagon, and the opportunity costs of more productive public investments that might have been made if funds had not been diverted overseas. Following Congressional Budget Office predictions for troop deployment, the report considers the possibilities of full U.S. withdrawal by 2010 to 2015. All told, the two economists put the cost to the U.S. at between $1 trillion (their most “conservative” estimate) and $2.2 trillion (their “moderate” one).

Via

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