That's the cost of war in Iraq, according to a new analysis by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Public Policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.
The money spent on one day of war in Iraq ($720 million) could provide healthcare for more than 420,000 American children or buy homes for 6,500 families.
And let's not forget the cost of war for Iraq itself: up to 1.2 million civilians killed, and the destruction of the country's priceless heritage.
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With so many dead and dying in Iraq, it seems crass to complain about the financial cost of the war. But the price tag is enormous, and will burden us for decades to come. Here's Nick Kristof (Times $elect):
For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional…
Lecturers, even at a university like Harvard, are pretty far down the food chain. Even if, like Linda Bilmes an economist at Harvard's Kennedy School, you were once an Assistant Secretary of Commerce in the Clinton Administration and co-authored a paper recently with a Nobel Laureate economist.…
We now have an estimate of the cost of the Iraq war. Remember when our administration was blithely proposing that it would require a few billion dollars?
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J. Freedom du Lac reports in the Washington Post that Army Spec. David Emanuel Hickman, killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on November 14th, was the 4,474th US servicemember to be killed in Iraq. With all the US troops now gone from Iraq, Hickman's death may well be the last servicemember…
YOU HATE FREEDOM.
This accomplished the end goal of one Grover Norquist, who wants to shrink the federal gov't down to a size where it is small enough to drown in the bath tub.
In essence, it's anti-federalists that have control now because they realize a strong fed is antithetical to unbridled abuse. They're the states rights crowd.
Just look at the beneficiaries of the war in Iraq. Norquist and his ilk get what they want, while big business gets to drain the federal governments coffers while reaping the benefit of a weakened or non-existent fed. After all, who need pesky EPA or OSHA regulations.
The % of GNP for Iraq is less than that of spending in WWI.
Kafka, ain't that a little like comparing apples to thumbtacks? Iraq has involved 150,000ish soldiers at any time, whereas WWI involved drafting 4 million men in a few years, training them, and then deploying them at a rate of 10,000 men a day.
Another difference -- there was no oil in Germany.