Hole in the Future

[TeeYiYi]

Hole in the Future

by Robert C. Koehler - February 1, 2006

For those impervious to the suffering of others, a dollar figure sometimes helps bring it home. Two honest economists have recently put one on the Iraq war, and in so doing shown a spotlight on the black hole in the center of our future.

If $1 trillion makes you gag, try $2 trillion.

The latter number is the "moderate," as opposed to the conservative, price tag that Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes have put on the war, which they calculated by factoring in some - but by no means all - of its real costs, such as lifelong care for brain-injured U.S. troops.

The most outrageous deception in the selling of this war three years ago is not the claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or had links to al-Qaida, but the blithe assertion that the war could be fought for chump change; it was supposed to be pay-as-you-go, financed by liberated oil revenue. White House economic advisor Larry Lindsey was sacked for saying the adventure could cost the country as much as $200 billion; of course, the total, even by conventional calculation, has gone well beyond that.

Stiglitz and Bilmes begin to demonstrate that the invasion of Iraq amounted to the complete collapse of fiscal sanity - tantamount to the collapse of moral sanity - the blame for which rests not simply with the Bush administration or Congress, reckless as they were in their duty to guard the national interest, but with the administration's base of the willingly deceived, which is a fearful percentage of the population. . . .


Much more: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_robert_c_060201_hole_in_the_future.htm

TYY

[Richard D]

1. There are one trillion seconds . . .

. . . in 32,000 years.

[BlueEyedSon]

2. Here is the chart from the NYTIMES ($1.4 trillion)

[depakid]

3. That's only direct costs

It does NOT include externalities and opportunity costs.

Add those in and the figure runs much higher.

[BlueEyedSon]

4. Likewise, it does not include indirect profits.

[depakid]

6. Profits?

Most of that is cost shifting- though to the extent taxes are paid, some amount comes back into the system. Likewise, plunder results in some remuneration- though if you fail to capture the resource, that's short term and and in any event, won't come close to resulting in a net gain.

[rodeodance]

5. "the willingly deceived"---

[rodeodance]

7. this includes certainly MORE than his 'base"

......Stiglitz and Bilmes begin to demonstrate that the invasion of Iraq amounted to the complete collapse of fiscal sanity - tantamount to the collapse of moral sanity - the blame for which rests not simply with the Bush administration or Congress, reckless as they were in their duty to guard the national interest, but with the administration's base of the willingly deceived, which is a fearful percentage of the population. . . .

[TeeYiYi]

8. kick

TYY:kick: