Reason #94: War on a Credit Card
When you’ve got a half trillion dollar annual budget like the Pentagon does, it’s easy to squirrel away a few billion here and there.
As of this writing, the official cost of our disastrous invasion of Iraq is over $500 billion and counting. To put it in perspective, that’s almost $20,000 for every man, woman, and child in Iraq and almost 2,000 bucks for every American citizen. But the sad reality is, we’re paying way more than that for this tragic blunder.
Since the invasion, congress has been writing checks on credit to pay for the war. (That’s right, we’re borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars, on top of our nearly $10 trillion national debt, to fund this futile conflict.) These “emergency supplementals,” as they’re called in government-ese, allow hawks in Washington to pretend the war isn’t costing us anything. Let future generations pay for our actions-that’s their attitude.
As shameful as this war-on-a-credit-card is, though, the current figures don’t even scratch the surface when it comes to the real amount due. In other words, our government has been lying to us again. The real costs are vastly more than we’ve been told.
When you’ve got a half trillion dollar annual budget like the Pentagon does, it’s easy to squirrel away a few billion here and there. And if you think that’s not happening on a massive scale when it comes to the Iraq War, you’re dreaming. Since the first soldiers set foot on the Arabian sands in 2003, government bean counters have been playing a giant shell game with our money. According to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a conservative estimate is that one quarter of the Pentagon’s budget (or about $125 billion every year) is actually be diverted to fund our Mideast misadventure.
Think of all the military equipment being ground to pieces over there in the sand and the grit and the desert heat-everything from tanks and Humvees to uniforms and rifles. The cost of repairing and replacing all that stuff is not always included in the official estimates. Instead, the Pentagon bills Congress separately for much of those expenses.
Defense Department bureaucrats have done the same thing with the increased costs of recruiting. Since the war began, the armed services have struggled to lure enough young people into their ranks, so they now offer big signing bonuses and other incentives. But those costs aren’t included in the supplemental appropriations Congress passes to fund the war.
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