Buyer's Remorse

I noted last week that Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes were about to release a report that the full cost of waging war in Iraq--taking into account not just what Congress appropriates, but hidden costs such as health care for wounded soldiers and higher gas prices due to regional instability--would approach $2 trillion. Yes, $2 trillion. That's on par with the entire federal budget for 2006 of $2.6 trillion. Salon's Mark Benjamin has a good round-up of the report (subscription or waiting through a web ad required):

A new study by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz from Columbia University and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes shows that the price tag for the war, including the cost of caring for thousands of wounded and ill veterans, will easily surpass $1 trillion -- and could reach as much as $2 trillion when all is said and done.

"What shocked me was the number of wounded with very serious injuries," Bilmes said in an interview, regarding the costs of caring for soldiers' severe wounds. A number of soldiers who've suffered brain trauma in the war are already facing poor treatment and falling through the cracks of a beleaguered military healthcare system. Bilmes says that most public government estimates of the cost of war exclude pricey items like taking care of veterans. "I think it would be much, much better if people knew about these costs before waging a war," she noted.

[...]

The study considers a number of hidden costs, including the price tag of caring for the 20 percent of wounded soldiers returning from Iraq with "major head or spinal injury," plus amputees and soldiers with "blindness, deafness, partial vision and hearing impairment, nerve damage and burns." The study figures that 3,213 soldiers who have suffered head or brain injuries in Iraq, for example, will need lifetime care that could total from $600,000 to $5 million per soldier.

The study also includes scenarios where some veterans will need care for 20 or 40 years. It also estimates, based on trends from the Persian Gulf War, that additional veterans will later need disability checks from the Department of Veterans Affairs to compensate them for a wide range of service-related health problems, at a price tag of at least $2.3 billion per year, for decades.

And the study looks at increased defense spending, payments on federal debt generated by the war and the depreciation of military hardware. It gives a number of possible price tags for Iraq, starting with an $839 billion "conservative" estimate of costs directly tied to the war. A top estimate of $2 trillion takes into account more diffuse factors such as the war's continuing impact on the price of oil.

Contrast that with the initial projections proffered by the BushCo administration--and their shutting down of dissenting opinion:

In January 2003, then White House Office of Management and Budget director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. told the New York Times that the war in Iraq could cost $50 billion to $60 billion. That was significantly lower than a September 2002 estimate by Bush's former chief economic advisor Lawrence B. Lindsey, who said that the war in Iraq might cost $100 billion to $200 billion. That got Lindsey run out of the Bush administration on a rail -- or as the New York Times meekly put it on Jan. 3, 2003, it "helped pave the way" for Lindsey's ouster.