War Costing $720 Million Each Day
The occupation in Iraq is costing $720 million a day or $500,000 a minute. That figure is based on the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer Linda J. Bilmes published in the Milken Institute Review. They estimate the cost of the Iraq war to date at $2.2 Trillion and climbing.
The $720 million per day figure includes $280 million of expenses already funded by Congress, plus $440 million daily in incurred, but unpaid, long-term costs, such as the continued medical care of injured soldiers. The figure does not include “macro-economic consequences” described by Bilmes and Stiglitz, including higher oil prices, loss of trade because of anti-American sentiments and lost productivity of killed or injured U.S. soldiers.
Since Congress has only appropriated funds for, about two-fifths of the long term cost of the Iraq war, and even that is largely funded with borrowed money. The net result is that most of the cost of the war, over 80% of it, will be left for future presidents, and future Congresses and future generations, to pay for.
$720 Million per day adds up quickly. It is over $5 Billion each week, $20 billion a month, $260 Billion per year. By any measure these are huge outlays of cash which have been committed by Congress and which must ultimately be extracted from American taxpayers. The necessity to meet these incurred obligations will affect the political calculus in Congress for decades to come. The requirement to service this enormous debt incurred by the Iraq folly is already severely restricting, if not outright precluding, our ability to move foreword important public policy initiatives.
By not acting to cut-off funding for the occupation, Congress has made a choice. By not shutting down funding for the illegal occupation in Iraq, the Congress has probably given up any chance for meaningful advances in healthcare reform, support for education, investments infrastructure and dozens of other initiatives which could have been possible, but now are very unlikely. The Trillions of dollars spent buying war and occupation in Iraq means that money is not available to invest in healthcare and education at home. It’s what economists refer to as ‘opportunity cost’. By funding the war in Iraq, the Congress has spent the opportunity for this country to address other pressing needs.
And those needs are many. Here are just some of the other programs Congress could have funded with that $720M per day.
With just one days worth of money spent on the war, for example, could have built 6000 new homes for New Orleans flood victims, or provided a 20% down payment on 30,000 homes. In just 10 days we could have funded the replacement of every home destroyed by Katrina and in another fortnight rebuilt the entire levee system in New Orleans to meet new federal standards. That’s New Orleans rebuilt with less than one month’s worth of Iraq war spending.
With just one days worth of money spent on the war, for example, would cover one year health insurance premiums for 650,000 uninsured children or 180,000 families. An entire year of universal health coverage, including the 47 million currently uninsured, could be had for just six months worth of Iraq spending.
With just one day worth of money spent on the war we could provide incentives for the replacement of 144,000 gas guzzlers with new Hybrid cars, saving over 20,000 barrels a day in imported oil. Another day’s worth of Iraq spending could outfit 360,000 homes with renewable energy technology saving another 20,000 barrels a day. In this way, with just a few months worth of war spending, we could cut dependence on imported energy in half.
One days worth of Iraq war funding would be enough to provide four-year state college scholarships to 124,000 students or about 10% of this year’s high school graduates. Just 10 days worth of Iraq war money could have provided free college education to every kid graduating high school last year, and with less than one years worth of Iraq war money we could have provided free college to an entire generation of our kids.
Think about that. Who would not trade the last hellish year of death and destruction in Iraq for the promise that an entire generation of American children could receive a free college education?
Apparently our Congress, that’s who.