From yesterday's AP wire via The Boston Globe, "Iraq costs are $119.4 billion and rising; lawmakers ponder how money might have been spent:
Even by Washington standards, the $119.4 billion that President Bush and Congress have provided for the first two years of the war in Iraq is real money.Though a tiny fraction of overall federal spending, the figure is huge in other ways. It dwarfs the $100 million that could hire 2,500 more airport security screeners,the $500 million that could add 69,400 more children to Head Start, the $1 billion that would let 160,000 more low-income families keep federal rent subsidies, Senate Democrats say. Or it could reduce the runaway federal deficit.
The $119.4 billion total, compiled by the White House Office of Management and Budget, is the administration's most comprehensive tally of the war's financial costs so far. Of the total, $97.2 billion has been for military operations, $21.2 billion for rebuilding Iraq's economy and government, and $1 billion for U.S. administrative expenses there.
[. . .]
If not used for war, the money could take a healthy bite out of the government's runaway annual deficits, which are expected to set a record this year exceeding $400 billion. The $119.4 billion is four times this year's federal spending for biomedical research, 14 times what Washington will spend to clean the environment, 26 times the FBI's budget.
The total would also be enough to hand every Iraqi a check for $4,776 about eight times that country's average income.
Lawrence Lindsey, then the White House economic adviser, estimated before the Iraq war that it could cost $100 billion to $200 billion. Other administration officials called the figure far too large and argued that Iraq's oil revenues would let the country largely rebuild itself.
You remember Lawrence Lindsey, right?
"In late 2002, months before the Iraq war started, the Bush administration rebuked its own chief economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, for publicly estimating that a war in Iraq might cost $100 billion to $200 billion. In December 2002, Mitch Daniels, then the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the cost more likely would be $50 billion to $60 billion — which now looks like a fraction of the actual expenses. (via The San Francisco Chronicle)
