High costs of war continue under Obama

Reporting for Stars and Stripes, Leo Shane writes on the highlights of a conference call with award-winning Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University economist Linda Bilmes. The focus of the call was on Stiglitz and Bilmes book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict and recent estimates. The book was first published in 2008. The $3 Trillion refers to the low estimate of the military-related costs of the Iraq War, including, among other things, the medical costs for veterans, the related costs for their famiies, and the opportunity costs for government, that is, what the government could have altrernatively spent on domestic programs here in the US (e.g., education, green infrastructure, job creation, medical care for all, etc.). The costs were estimated by the authors through 2017. The high-end cost estimate was $5-trillion.

Shane reports that, in the conference call, "Bilmes said about 600,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have already sought medical treatment from the Department of Veteran Affairs, and 500,000 have applied for disability benefits." Bilmes continued: "That's about 30 percent higher than initial estimates for care, and could cost the department nearly $1 trillion in costs for the current wars alone."

In addition, Shane reports, "Stiglitz said history has shown the cost of treating illness such as post-traumatic stress disorders only increase with time, and with the country still expecting a significant presence in Afghanistan for years to come, the bills will keep piling up."

See full story at: http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central_1.8040/study-wars-could-cost-4-trilliong-to-6-trillion-1.120054


From another source: A headline from Truthdig.com on August 9, 2010, indicates that "Obama Will Spend More than Bush on Military." (http://www.truthdig.com/ )

Truth.dig quotes from the New York Times as follows:

"Mr Gates [Secretary of Defense] is calling for the Pentagon's budget to keep growing in the long run at 1 percent a year after inflation, plus the cost of the war[s]. It has averaged an inflation-adjusted growth rate of 7 percent a year over the last decade (nearly 12 percent a yar without adjusting for inflation), including the costs of the wars. So far, Mr. Obama has asked Congress for an increase of total spending next year of 2.2 percent, to $708 billion - 6.1 percent higher than the peak under the Bush administration."

The implication of these estimates is that, when spending on the wars is included with other net increased in the military spending, Obama's military budget will be higher than what the Bush administration allocated in their highest military-spending year. Note also that the $708 billion does not include the costs of long-term medical care for veterans or the costs to their families of providing often extensive and long-term care, or, additionally, how rising military-related costs reduce expenditures on many important domestic programs in the US.