War costs more than admitted — and it’s continuing to climb
As the congressional debt-reduction “super committee” begins work this week, it had better take into account trillions of dollars in anticipated war costs that no one in Washington seems willing to acknowledge.
For decades now (and probably much longer) government estimates of war costs strove not to count numerous secondary expenses that result from combat, like veterans’ health care — or the $20 billion wasted in Pakistan. Officials find the real numbers embarrassing. A recent Congressional Budget Office report, for example, placed the total costs of the Iraq and Afghan wars at $1.4 trillion, based solely on congressional appropriations specifically dedicated to those wars.
But a new academic study counts everything and puts the wars’ full price at about $4 trillion — almost all of it deficit spending. That’s nearly 30 percent of the nation’s $14 trillion debt. Even that, the study’s authors say, doesn’t include some costs that cannot be tallied, like those in the intelligence agencies’ “black” budgets, or the hundreds of millions in impromptu “death gratuities” paid to families of Americans and some foreigners killed in war.
The more disturbing finding, however, is that in the coming years the wars threaten to cost the nation another $2 trillion — in interest payments on war debt as well as continuing medical expenses for 150,000 wounded veterans.
No one in Washington is talking about that. Nobody wants to admit that these wars will end up costing $6 trillion or more — if all the troops were to come home right now. (That sum would pay the health-care costs for every single American for more than two years — or fund the federal government, in full, for a year and a half.)
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The United States has little to gain from continuing either war. They are mile-deep money pits. If the super committee wants to find trillions of dollars in savings, it should look there first.