Paying the Bush War Bill, Defaulting on Our Future

[marmar]

from OurFuture.org:



Paying the Bush War Bill, Defaulting on Our Future
By Terrance Heath

April 10th, 2008 - 10:02am ET


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It's almost a shame that the subprime mortgage bonanza burned out before the sun finally sets on the George W. Bush administration. After all, they managed to lure Americans into a war we didn't need and couldn't afford, then stuck us with a ballooning bill and never ending payments. Reborn as a brokerage firm dealing in subprime mortgages, this administration could have made a killing.

Don't take my word for it. Just have a look at your bill.

What could your family do right now with $100 a month? How about a little more then $100 a month? Got an answer? Good. You won't be doing anything with that $100, because that's you're share of the monthly bill for George W. Bush's war in Iraq.

It started out as a statement Sen. Barack Obama made at a campaign stop. Then the St. Petersburg Times picked up on it, decided to do the math, and discovered that the price was right.

“When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you’re paying a price for this war,” he said in the speech in Charleston, W.Va.

The figure came from The Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, a new book by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Blimes. The number checked out, but lacked a footnote. So the Times called up one of the authors.

There was no footnote for the $100 estimate, so we called Bilmes to ask how she had calculated it. She said they took the Bush administration’s 2008 request for war funding – $196-billion – and divided it by 12 to get a monthly cost. That works out to $16-billion for both wars and about $12-billion just for the Iraq portion.

Then, she and Stiglitz divided those figures by the number of U.S. households and came up with $138 for both wars and slightly more than $100 for Iraq alone, she said.

We double-checked the authors' sources and math, and found they were right.

Indeed, the Bush administration request for 2008 was $196-billion for both wars, with $159-billion going to Iraq, according to a summary by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. A recent Census Bureau report said there were 116-million households. So that works out to about $140 per month for both wars and about $114 for Iraq alone. (Our numbers are slightly higher than Bilmes and Stiglitz because we used the latest estimates from CRS and a newer and slighter higher count for households.)

To understand how the selling of the Iraq war would make any broker of subprime mortgages proud, you have to remember how the Bush administration lowballed the costs of the war at $50 billion. You have to keep in mind that the Pentagon has overspent by $295 billion on weapons systems that are over budget and behind schedule, and the Army made a $300 million deal with a 22-year-old contractor to send 40-year-old ammunition to Afghanistan. You might also consider that, with these headlines still fresh, the State department just renewed Blackwater's contract, despite investigations into tax violations and the murders of Iraqi civilians.

The Bush administration's crackdown on contractor fraud, by forcing companies to report abuse of taxpayer money, has a major loophole: it doesn't apply in Iraq and Afghanistan, or anywhere else overseas. House Democrats are demanding documents related to loophole, in order to figure out just how it slipped into a plan to protect taxpayer money. In turn, the Bush administration is delaying the delivery of the documents. (The White House says it is "working with the committee" and plans to provide a response to its request "in the near term.") There's enough deception and disinformation — from the still-missing WMDs to the imaginary Saddam/al Qaida link — in the above to warm impress even the most crooked subprime mortgage broker.

Meanwhile, we continue to pay and the price keeps going up. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/paying-bush-war-bill-defaulting-our-future

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Love the title: 'Bush War'.