Misblog

The Three Trillion Dollar War is a book format of a paper published by economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and government budget-finance policy wonk Linda J. Bilmes. Their original paper provoked quite a few comments and the book addresses those comments while updating the original paper1. The current operating war costs of $800 billion dollars exceed the original $50 billion dollar estimate by more than a factor of 10! At the current dollar burn-rate of $16 billion dollars per month the original estimate would barely cover three months operating costs of war!

Worldcat

When you add in the future costs and interest on the entirely borrowed money you get the conservative and staggering estimate for a Three Trillion Dollar War!

If we were originally chasing down 50,000 terrorists that works out to $60,000,000 per terrorist—guess who wins if Bush's War continues.

The Three Trillion Dollar War is a must read book for those trying to understand the potential magnitude of the costs for Bush's disastrous, discretionary, and preemptory war:

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1. The book also makes 18 recommendations aimed at ensuring we do not have a repeat of the catastrophic Iraq debacle in the future.