Inflated Costs of War

Campus Report ^ | June 4, 2008 | Rachel Paulk

[bs9021]

Inflated Costs of War

by: Rachel Paulk, June 04, 2008

The Three Trillion Dollar War attempts to calculate the accurate total cost of the war in Iraq, covering factors not included in the government’s official $800 billion figure. Authors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate Iraq’s three trillion dollar tab by combining the budgetary costs of the war with their interpreted macroeconomic and social economic consequences of the conflict.

When computing the budgetary costs of the war, the award-winning economists focus on four factors: current costs, predicted future costs, hypothesized “hidden” costs, and approximated interest.

These scenarios are utilized to predict future operational expenditures, the total cost of veterans’ disability and health care, and the potential price tag covered by various departments of the government.

With these theoretical situations in place, Bilmes of Harvard and Stiglitz of Columbia combine the current budgetary costs of the war with their predicted estimates for future costs of the conflict. Elements of the future costs include disability compensation and medical benefits for veterans, as well as the cost of rebuilding the exhausted postwar military.

Also discussed are the “hidden” costs of the war, a term used to describe the unreported costs of Iraq absorbed by governmental departments such as the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

SOCIAL ECONOMIC COSTS...

[Patrick1]

In other words they just make this s**t up for the college clowns who will buy anything.

[stan_sipple]

lets do a study of the cost of having Clinton do nothing for eight years so the terrorists could plot to attack us.

[Maceman]

Maybe they should use the same methodology for calculating the costs of global warming programs, and all regulatory and social programs for that matter.

[iopscusa]

How about they do the “hidden” costs of something that is not successful like the War on Poverty, or the Illegal Alien crisis, the SS pyramid scheme, the oportunity cost of Communism, etc...the idiot lieberal thinkers are as stupid and closed minded as any group in the world!

[FFranco]

We should make the Iraqis pay for their freedom by giving us their oil for the cost of production for the next 100 years.

[Richard Axtell]

Imagine the hidden costs created by a World War that we had failed to prevent, as we blithely witnessed the coalescing of the Islamo-Fascist Empire, which would have stretched from the Indian border to the Mediterranean Sea? Such would have been the outcome of the established policies of the Clinton administration and the State Department establishment. Instead of the inevitable, we snatched the key piece of the game away from the Caliphate, and maybe changed the course of history, for the better.

[Alberta's Child]

The author of this article raises legitimate points, but I would contend that any calculation of the costs of the Iraq war are meaningless unless they include the inflationary impact of the massive flow of cash from the U.S. to Iraq to pay contractors, bribe Iraqi officials, etc. over the last few years.