[Nyclocal] The $2 Trillion Nightmare

[William Wharton]

NYTIMES
March 4, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
The $2 Trillion Nightmare
By BOB HERBERT

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.



      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Be a better friend, newshound, and 
know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile.  Try it now.  http://mobile.yahoo.com/;_ylt=Ahu06i62sR8HDtDypao8Wcj9tAcJ