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Congressional Democrats estimate cost of the wars so far to be $1.5 trillion. $800 billion requested, with the rest coming from high oil costs, reservists being pulled out of the productive economy, interest on money borrowed to pay for the war, forgone investment return on war expenditures, and veteran treatments (though the bottom of the article puts that at $30 billion, chump change on this scale.) White House calls it inaccurate and politically motivated.
Apparently reservists often come home, if they do, to find that they don't have a job anymore, with minimal help from the government.
Do the numbers make sense? Let's make some estimates -- not for precision, not even ballparks I'd necessarily bet on; sometimes the estimation itself is informative, or at least pleasant.
I can't tell easily how many reservists are activated or what that means. I've seen 7 brigades in Iraq, for 14,000-21,000 people, but also reports of 130,000 reservists activated -- are those support troops overseas, or ones here?
Assuming $20,000 per reservist civilian job, that's lost income (and economic output) of $280 million to $2.6 billion a year. Probably double or triple that, since I was lowballing the salary estimates, and workers generally produce more than they get paid. That's still an upper bound of $9 billion * 6 years = $54 billion.
US consumes about 388 million gallons of gasoline a day, call it 140 billion gallons a year. Say prices jumped 50 cents a gallon for 2003 through 2005, and another 50 cents for 2006 through 2007 (prices have gone higher, but they also go down, I'm trying to do a half-assed integral here), and say we can blame that almost entirely on the war, then that's additional oil costs of 3*$70 billion + 2 * $140 billion = $490 billion. Even if you skeptically knock off a fair bit of that, you'd still get $300 billion. If you assume most of it would have happened anyway, and the war's only good for 10 cents on the gallon, that'd be $70 billion.
If we'd borrowed the $800 billion war cost at 5% interest, that'd be $40 billion a year. If we'd borrowed the same amount but invested it in something (infrastructure? education?) at 6% then we'd be making $8 billion, rather than spending $40 billion. $800 billion is from the article, and might be high; I see somewhat lower numbers on the web, and maybe a fifth of that is Afghanistan, which had some justification. So maybe a conservative interest/investment total cost of $80 billion for the past four years, and a bold estimate (use full figure, assume 8% investment return) of $200 billion.
We've lost 3000 soldiers in Iraq, and maybe 4-5 times that have been crippled. Monetary value estimates on an American life are in the $1-3 million range, I think, so losses of $3-15 billion, particularly including medical costs. Then there's knock-on costs of "hey, I lost my husband/father" which I won't try to estimate.
So, on the high end, additional costs of $490+200+54+15 = $760 billion. Lower end, maybe $300 billion.
The exchange rate GDP of Iraq is about $40 billion/year, by the way. So just the amount we've openly spent so far, never mind these additional estimates, has been a decade's worth of Iraq's entire economy. We're spending twice as much money on Iraq as it produces, per year. Somehow I don't think their standard of living has tripled.
Apparently reservists often come home, if they do, to find that they don't have a job anymore, with minimal help from the government.
Do the numbers make sense? Let's make some estimates -- not for precision, not even ballparks I'd necessarily bet on; sometimes the estimation itself is informative, or at least pleasant.
I can't tell easily how many reservists are activated or what that means. I've seen 7 brigades in Iraq, for 14,000-21,000 people, but also reports of 130,000 reservists activated -- are those support troops overseas, or ones here?
Assuming $20,000 per reservist civilian job, that's lost income (and economic output) of $280 million to $2.6 billion a year. Probably double or triple that, since I was lowballing the salary estimates, and workers generally produce more than they get paid. That's still an upper bound of $9 billion * 6 years = $54 billion.
US consumes about 388 million gallons of gasoline a day, call it 140 billion gallons a year. Say prices jumped 50 cents a gallon for 2003 through 2005, and another 50 cents for 2006 through 2007 (prices have gone higher, but they also go down, I'm trying to do a half-assed integral here), and say we can blame that almost entirely on the war, then that's additional oil costs of 3*$70 billion + 2 * $140 billion = $490 billion. Even if you skeptically knock off a fair bit of that, you'd still get $300 billion. If you assume most of it would have happened anyway, and the war's only good for 10 cents on the gallon, that'd be $70 billion.
If we'd borrowed the $800 billion war cost at 5% interest, that'd be $40 billion a year. If we'd borrowed the same amount but invested it in something (infrastructure? education?) at 6% then we'd be making $8 billion, rather than spending $40 billion. $800 billion is from the article, and might be high; I see somewhat lower numbers on the web, and maybe a fifth of that is Afghanistan, which had some justification. So maybe a conservative interest/investment total cost of $80 billion for the past four years, and a bold estimate (use full figure, assume 8% investment return) of $200 billion.
We've lost 3000 soldiers in Iraq, and maybe 4-5 times that have been crippled. Monetary value estimates on an American life are in the $1-3 million range, I think, so losses of $3-15 billion, particularly including medical costs. Then there's knock-on costs of "hey, I lost my husband/father" which I won't try to estimate.
So, on the high end, additional costs of $490+200+54+15 = $760 billion. Lower end, maybe $300 billion.
The exchange rate GDP of Iraq is about $40 billion/year, by the way. So just the amount we've openly spent so far, never mind these additional estimates, has been a decade's worth of Iraq's entire economy. We're spending twice as much money on Iraq as it produces, per year. Somehow I don't think their standard of living has tripled.
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Date: 2007-11-15 01:29 (UTC)From:In the meantime I hear we're still not guarding our infrastructure properly. Or even maintaining it *cough* 13% of bridges rated as under par *cough*.