Cost of War Heading toward One Trillion Dollars
From
Juan Cole:
This item says that Bush administration officials told the American people that the Iraq War would cost $50 billion. A reader reminds me that the head of US AID actually put the cost at $1.7 billion. Paul Wolfowitz, that great economist now neoliberalizing the World Bank, even implied that Iraqi petroleum would pay for Iraq reconstruction. The cost of the war is rising toward a thousand billion dollars, i.e. a short-scale $1 trillion. Bush is still keeping this sum off the official budget (why?), and so it does not show up in the official figures for the budget deficit. But the money for the war is being borrowed, so that our grandchildren will still be debt slaves of Halliburton and Boeing. Folks, we've done been low-balled. The difference between us and that young couple with the coupe, though is at least they have a coupe. We've got rubble in the Middle East for our $1 trillion, on which we're paying interest every month.
(Thanks PVC)
