What a waste!

The Iraq War is going to cost the United States almost $3 trillion through 2017, assuming a modest level of 75,000 troops through that year, according to a new Congressional report. The report takes into account both the direct and indirect expenses of the war and says that the cost per family is going to be $36,900. The war has already put a burden of $16,500 on a family of four. (The report is available at the Congressional Joint Economic Committee’s website)

Predictably, the analysis has the Republicans crying foul. They allege that the Democrats in charge of the committee have played with the numbers. But this is the right way to measure the cost of that unnecessary conflict. The budgetary impact, as large as it is, captures only a fraction of the economic toll on this country.

The report details the multiple ways in which the war has been detrimental to the U.S. economy. Most obviously, the turmoil in Iraq has contributed to a diminished global oil production, making all of us pay higher prices at the pump. The report estimates that the Iraq fiasco has contributed at least $5 per barrel to the increase in oil prices.

And then there are several other costs, too. The government has had to spend borrowed money for the war, diverting spending from more productive uses and paying massive interest payments on its war profligacy. Substantial sums have had to be paid for treating wounded war veterans. There have been several lifetimes of lost productivity for the injured. Considerable military equipment has been damaged. And the list goes on.

The report draws on a study done by Nobel-winner Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Professor Linda Blimes in January 2006 that projected the total cost of the war as between $1 trillion and $2 trillion. On a visit to The Progressive’s office last November, Stiglitz actually revised the figures upward, saying that $3 trillion was closer to the mark. And he seems to have been right.

I’m not going to do that whole guns versus butter thing and lament about all the productive expenditure this money could have been utilized for. It’s giving the Bush Administration too much credit to assume that they would have guided all that amount to more rational uses. (For those interested in such numbers, the American Friends Service Committee has some heartbreaking comparative statistics on the myriad ways the funds could have been better spent.)

Instead, the war fits in well with the Bush Administration’s plan of starving social spending by pleading lack of funds. So you had the grotesque sight a few weeks ago of President Bush fighting tooth and nail against expansion of the SCHIP program, and then asking for an additional $46 billion for the war.

In a review of a new book on George McGovern last week in the New York Times Book Review, the reviewer noted that both McGovern and Richard Nixon had a guaranteed income plan in 1972 for all Americans, with the Nixon plan being more generous in some respects.

Now we have a Republican President unwilling to even spend on providing health insurance for children. The war fits in very well with this agenda. A few hundreds of billions spent here, a few hundreds of billions wasted there, on fighting a pointless war, and pretty soon you can claim bankruptcy. For the Bush folks, the Iraq War serves a number of purposes.