the 2 trillion nightmare
decides2dream
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/opinion/04herbert.html?em&ex=1204866000&en=85633a4996272226&ei=5087
The $2 Trillion Nightmare
By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 4, 2008
We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.
The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.
What we’re getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Mr. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war. These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.
Mr. Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first gulf war, which lasted just a month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.
“Imagine then,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “what a war — that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years — will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.”
The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through “emergency” appropriations that get far less scrutiny.
Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by. Mr. Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Ms. Bilmes called “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” said they had to go to veterans’ groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.
Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.
Mr. Hormats told the committee:
“Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war. Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good ... And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War.”
Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”
Some former presidents — Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower — were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century. That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of S.N.L.
It’s a new era.
The $2 Trillion Nightmare
By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 4, 2008
We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.
The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.
What we’re getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Mr. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war. These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.
Mr. Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first gulf war, which lasted just a month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.
“Imagine then,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “what a war — that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years — will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.”
The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through “emergency” appropriations that get far less scrutiny.
Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by. Mr. Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Ms. Bilmes called “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” said they had to go to veterans’ groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.
Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.
Mr. Hormats told the committee:
“Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war. Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good ... And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War.”
Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”
Some former presidents — Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower — were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century. That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of S.N.L.
It’s a new era.
Stay with me...
Let's just breathe...
I am myself like you somehow
Let's just breathe...
I am myself like you somehow
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Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
btw - nice sig pic. Debs is a super hero.
Thanks
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
MAHER: But do you understand why so many liberals, Democrats, are frustrated with this Congress? It has a 23% approval rating, which is, of course, less than even President Bush. And, you know, you were elected to get us out of Iraq. I think a lot of people have the suspicion that the Democrats actually don’t want us to get out of Iraq, because it’s such a good campaign issue for the Democrats.
McCASKILL: Oh, that’s not true. That’s really not true. You know, the bottom line is, we’ve had a record number of filibusters in the Senate. It takes 60 votes for us to – frankly, we argue over apple pie, at this point. They want to filibuster over it. And we’ve got to get a new president, because anything we do on Iraq, he vetoes. Which means we have to have two-thirds, and we’re not even anywhere two-thirds. I mean–
MAHER: Well–
McCASKILL: –even if you don’t count Joe Lieberman.
MAHER: But the Congress holds the purse strings. If you didn’t vote the money he always asks for, then he couldn’t wage that war.
McCASKILL: No. But you know what he’d do? He would just cut other things. You know, there – it is not that simple. And here’s the bottom line. Most of us got elected last time on a voice of change, and we believe in it, and we’re trying. We just need everybody to, like, really get motivated and turn out this November, and let’s finish this job. Let’s elect some more Democrats to the Senate, more to the House, and – and elect Barack Obama president. And I think you’ll see real change.
I think it is their job to vote for what's right and not push these excuses to blame Bush for all of their own shortcomings. They always have the option to vote against any cuts Bush tried to push in other programs. I don't understand this whole 'voting in fear of what bush might do next' type thinking. It comes across as incredibly weak leadership skills and lack of conviction. I think it's a copout.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
2 Trillion = Iraq
2 Trillion = Credit Bubble Deflation ...
we'll get THIS half of the check sometime between now and 2009.
We are just waiting for the banks to quit playing games and actually take their freaking writedowns, which EVERYONE knows are coming.
If I opened it now would you not understand?
The other perspective is what if the Democrats were successful in cutting the funds and the troops came home, but Iraq's civil war got worse and led to genocide and total anarchy? Also, if there's no withdraw plan in place, then how long would it take to bring home all the troops? They can't just pack up and leave and be home next week. It would takes months, all without funding. I want the troops home and this war to stop as bad as anyone, but it's complex. You can't just say cut funding and have no strategic plan for how to deal with the circumstances that follow.
Of course you can't...but there's better plans than the ones adopted, far better.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
NO its not.
Its real simple.
Cheney and company knew for a FACT going in that it would be the mythical mother of all quagmeyrs.
They knew the American people could be sold on the need to stay in order to protect our "moral highground" and the equally mythical legacy of the good American.
The truth is Iraq was going to be a clusterfuck from day one, the Bush administration knew this for certain, and they acted "carelessly" deliberately in order to keep us there forever.
Its not complex.
It was just pure evil.
:(
If I opened it now would you not understand?
I totally agree. The start of this war is not complex, but ending it and bringing the troops home under this current administration and congress is very complex. I'm sure you've seen the clip of Cheney in '94 saying that invading Baghdad would create a quagmire. He knew but 10 years later it's a surprise and they have no plan for it. What a fucking disgrace.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BEsZMvrq-I
Yes, there can be even better plans drawn up, but it's of no use if you can't pass legislation for a gradual withdraw. You're saying that Obama should not have voted to fund the war when all other legislation with a timetable for withdraw failed due to filibusters and vetoes. But it's not that simple. You can't just cut funding in the middle of the war and just leave the troops on the battlefield.
You need to pass a law with a stategic plan to get out, but sadly, that doesn't seem possible with the current adminstration and congress.
I'm saying the Dems have no political courage. They were cowards except for a select few who refused to support Bush's extravagance. The Dems got majority and did shit with it...letting down everyone who voted for them. They just twiddle their thumbs and follow suit instead of standing up and introducing better bills.
And now we're in 2 trillion dollars worth of debt and everyone wants to make any excuse they can for it so it makes their golden boy look better. Please.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
-Oscar Wilde
What are you talking about? Who's the golden boy? Obama? Or Bush? I'm seriously confused.
How many times did the Dems try to pass anti-war legislation? Many times. I'm not giving the Dems a passing grade here, but you don't seem to be understanding the stalemate caused by the Republicans in Congress. There won't be 2/3 to override a Bush veto on any bill with a timetable, so what options do you have? When the funds run out, you have to authorize more funding until you can create a better bill. Are you suggesting that Congress should have just cut funding?
the other foot in the gutter
sweet smell that they adore
I think I'd rather smother
-The Replacements-
but didn't the G.A.O. say the real number was 53 Trillion
PEARL JAM~San Antonio, TX. 4~5~03
INCUBUS~Houston, TX. 1~19~07
INCUBUS~Denver, CO. 2~8~07
Lollapalooza~Chicago, IL. 8~5~07
INCUBUS~Austin, TX. 9~3~07
Bonnaroo~Manchester, TN 6~14~08
PEARL JAM~San Antonio, TX. 4~5~03
INCUBUS~Houston, TX. 1~19~07
INCUBUS~Denver, CO. 2~8~07
Lollapalooza~Chicago, IL. 8~5~07
INCUBUS~Austin, TX. 9~3~07
Bonnaroo~Manchester, TN 6~14~08
are you talking about the total unfunded future liability from entitlements?
Because the war and the housing bubble sure as fuck better not add up to 53 trillion.
That dwarfs the entire M3 money supply!
If I opened it now would you not understand?