Iraq War May Cost US $1 Trillion
Given the chaotic nature of war and the complexities of government accounting, it’s pretty much impossible to come up with a hard number. And as soon as you come up with one, someone will come along and challenge what you’ve chosen to include of leave out.
When economists or financial analysts make estimates like these, they often take one of two approaches: “bottom-up” or “top-down.” In a bottom-up estimate, you’d try to add up all the individual costs on your list of war-related expenses: everything from the preparation of a meal for the troops to the manufacture of each bullet. The top-down approach just looks at what has been spent and estimates the level of future spending. The two methods are almost guaranteed to come up with different numbers.
So you’ve got several comprehensive studies to choose from. One of the most up-to date comes from the National Priorities Project, and Amherst-Mass.-based group that tracks the impact of federal spending on local communities. Using a “top-down” calculation based on U.S. budget appropriations, the group estimates the total money spent or allocated comes to about $255 million per day, or a little less than $1.8 billion a week. That figure includes both military and non-military spending on things like reconstruction.
Other estimates cast a wider net in their definition of total costs — including things like the loss of life. Insurance companies and juries in wrongful death cases inevitably come up with a dollar figure, but any number used to represent the financial loss resulting from the death of more than 3,000 soldiers is only and estimate the true economic impact. Such estimates also include the short- and long-term cost of caring for the tens of thousands of those disabled in combat.
If you add these costs, and others, to the total tab, the cost of the war has jumped from $4.4 billion to $7.1 billion a month since the 2003 fiscal year, according to a paper co-authored in January by Columbia University professor and Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, an outspoken critic of the war. The paper estimates the total cost could top $1 trillion.
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