Bush Fired Larry Lindsey for Saying the War Might Cost $100 Billion

Remember, Bush fired Larry Lindsey because he said the war might cost $100 billion:

The Raw Story | Bush wars to cost 40 times higher than original estimates; $8,000 per man, woman child in US: Nick Juliano: New estimates show Iraq, Afghanistan will cost US $2.4 trillion; White House refuses to provide estimate. The United States is spending about $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country to pursue wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to new estimates that show the wars will cost about $2.4 trillion over the next decade.... "The number is so big, it boggles the mind," Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) told the newspaper. The CBO previously estimated the war's costs at $1.6 trillion, which did not include interest payments or Bush's latest request for an extra $46 billion in war funding.

Since President Bush decided to invade Iraq in early 2003, the war's costs have skyrocketed as government number-crunchers continue to revise their estimates. The latest estimate is more than 40 times higher than the Bush administration's initial estimates that the war would cost between $50 billion and $60 billion; meanwhile a proclivity for cutting taxes has marked Bush's tenure almost as much as his dedication to mounting international invasions. The latest CBO report puts government estimates in line with those from outside economists, who have long warned against the war-on-the-cheap pipe dreams of Bush and his allies. In 2002, Yale economist William Nordhaus estimated the war would cost $1.6 trillion by 2012, and last year Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said the costs could exceed $2 trillion.

Responding to the latest estimate, White House spokesman Sean Kevelighan refused to provide USA Today with an administration estimate of the war's cost, but he couldn't resist accusing Democrats of "playing politics" and "trying to artificially inflate" funding levels. The CBO assumed that 75,000 troops will remain in Iraq a decade from now in calculating the estimate. Although it is "very speculative," that estimate is far from unreasonable, Loren Thompson, a nonpartisan defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, told the newspaper. Already, the wars' $604 billion price tag is higher than than the costs of conflicts in Korea and Vietnam, when adjusted for inflation, according to a report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments...

IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH!! IMPEACH HIM NOW!!!

Comments

[wcw]

Ah, outrage. I remember when I could still feel it. Maybe age 16ish (Reagan bombing Tripoli) is the last time.

Congratulations on maintaining yours. Mine just got tired.

[sglover]

It's Bush's war, but my heart doesn't exactly skip a beat when Rahm Emanuel feings dismay. After seeing the Dems in action (or maybe I should say, "in paralysis") since last January, they're accomplices as far as I'm concerned. "They voted for it before they voted against it" -- The only Republican slogan with a glimmer of truth.

The whole house of cards is getting pretty wobbly. We're no longer a constitutional republic. Banana republic is more like it.

[Julian Elson]

This is coming to, what, $100,000 per Iraqi man, woman, and child? $400,000 for a family of four?

BTW: I don't think it's 100% true that Nordhaus estimated the cost at $1.6 trillion in 2002. I have memories of reading an article by him on the war costs in the NYRB*, and I think he gave a range from $140 billion to $1.4 trillion, depending on factors like the impact on oil prices and the like. $1.6 trillion might have been in his range, but if so, I think it was at the top of it.

*The link is as follows: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=15850, but I'm not a subscriber, so I can't exactly check the article.

[M. carey]

It has been quite successful in what it was intended to be- As a profit-making device for the (vice) prez's friends.

Also successful in the neo-cons hope of causing chaos in the ME

[pgl]

Didn't Lawrence also tick off his political masters when he criticized those steel tariffs? Lawrence was right to criticize but being right is a career limiting move within this White House.

[Not This Time]

It is true that Bush merits impeachment so greatly that failure to impeach him seriously jeopardizes our constitutional order.

Alas gross incompetence and political stonewalling are not among the proper grounds.

[wood turtle]

Maybe he fired Larry Lindsey for other reasons.

[josh bivens]

i had thought Lindsey had said as much as $200 billion, not $100 billion.

which changes your point not at all, except to make him look even a wee bit more honest/prescient in his assessment.

[Tuco]

It's time to recalibrate the outrage meter. Disabled vets are likely to live a lot longer than a decade. In other words these estimates are low.

As to the Dems being active enablers of Bush's corruption consider retroactive immunity for the Telco's, thus formalizing government spying on the American populace and the official formation of Fascist government business partnerships.

Time to recalibrate the outrage meter yet again.

I sometimes wonder if the founding fathers could have even imagined the level of corruption existing today in American government.

[Steinn Sigurdsson]

Lindsey was off by an order of magnitude!
Of course he fired him...

[Ken Houghton]

Julian Elson - Nordhaus's estimate was $99B on the low side, $1.924T on the high side in his AAAS paper (p. 77), a "non-technical" version of which was in the NYRB 5 Dec 2002.

See Bryan Caplan's link to it at http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/10/what_nordhaus_s.html

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/opinion/25thur1.html

October 25, 2007

Another $200 Billion

President Bush waited until he had vetoed a relatively inexpensive children's health insurance bill before asking for tens of billions of dollars more for his misadventure in Iraq. The cynicism of that maneuver is only slightly less shameful than the president's distorted priorities. Despite a pretense of fiscal prudence, Mr. Bush keeps throwing money at his war, regardless of the cost in blood, treasure or children's health care.

Mr. Bush is threatening to veto most of the 12 domestic spending bills now before Congress because Democrats want to provide $22 billion more than the $933 billion he has requested. His argument? Something about the president's responsibility to rein in lawmakers' "temptation to overspend."

This from a leader who turns federal surpluses into deficits, believes that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars can be financed on a separate set of books with borrowed money, and keeps having to go back to Congress for "emergency funding" because he cannot or will not tell the truth about what it is costing to fight these wars.

Mr. Bush's latest emergency request is for $46 billion. That would bring the 2008 price tag for Iraq and Afghanistan to $196.4 billion. Starting at Sept. 11, 2001, war-fighting expenses total a staggering $800 billion or more. The nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments says that by the end of the year spending on Iraq will probably surpass that on the Vietnam War.

Mr. Bush has said most of the new money would go for "day-to-day" military operations and "basic needs" like bullets, body armor and mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, which are designed to withstand bomb attacks, a rising threat to American forces in Iraq. The troops need safer vehicles and better armor, but it is beyond our ken why Mr. Bush could not cover this in his original budget submission, unless he wanted to confuse the public and limit Congressional oversight.

And there is no end in sight. Mr. Bush clearly plans to keep fighting this pointless war until his last day in office. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told The Times that he will press Congress to sustain current military spending levels even after the Iraq war ends so the Pentagon can repair and replace worn-out weapons and rebuild ground forces.

The Pentagon will certainly need help recovering, but the country cannot keep signing blank checks. The next president, and Congress, will finally have to impose some discipline, starting with an honest review of what is needed to keep America safe, not just enrich military contractors and their lobbyists.

Democrats have failed repeatedly to end the Iraq war or to substantially change its course. Now they face another test. Mr. Bush will try to ram his spending request through Congress before Christmas, using the impending holiday to create a false sense of urgency....

[anne]

http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/pdfs/cost_of_war.pdf

December 5, 2002

Iraq: The Economic Consequences of War
By William D. Nordhaus

[anne]

By summer 2002, the decision had been made on war and occupation and from this time Administration members both acted in concert to prepare the way at all costs and to make sure dissenting voices were not heard or were belittled and intimidated. The case for war was continually shown to be false and as continually the falsity was denied and ignored and successfully covered over with a language meant to arose fear.

Though the physical and mental and moral costs of the war and occupation are terrible beyond proper description, even the material costs have been subject to continual deception from University of Chicago warriors assuring in a comical accounting that drew no ridicule of a costless war.

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes were mocked at a trillion dollar material cost for war and occupation, while the mocking for $2.4 trillion is now all but irrelevant. We should be terrified of what we have done, but too few will be to stop what we are doing.

The Administration has just slashed Medicaid spending for disabled children and adults, a slashing that would have been restored by the health care bill the President vetoed and Congress would not override. Health care for 3.8 million needy children at a cost of a mere $7 billion a year, ready to be funded, was vetoed and the veto upheld. But, $2.4 trillion for a needless war in and occupation of Iraq unfunded is forever fine.

We have spent more in not rebuilding Iraq than we spent in rebuilding Japan after the World War amid the terrifying destruction that was Japan. Still, how often have I read and heard the material cost of war dismissed by those who drove us to war, and by those who drove us to war I mean the pretend thinkers of think tanks?

At a cost of $2.4 trillion, 4.7 million Iraqis have been driven from homes or even from country. At a cost of $2.4 trillion, there were already at estimated 650,000 Iraqi excess deaths by June 2006. At a cost of $2.4 trillion, we are bombing by air in urban Iraq continually. What have we come to?

[anne]

To suggest that we should not go to war was difficult enough, but to suggest leaving Iraq immediately and completely was more difficult with ridicule from the right that had driven us to war and the left that could not understand Iraq was not ours to colonize for the "good." I would suggest leaving Iraq years ago, and lunatics would ask me to explain how.

Even as the tragedy continues to unfold, the tragedy has spread beyond and we can scarcely go a day not threatening another people. The President is even now threatening Cuba, having earlier threatened Iran in a double threat special for the day. Can there be a triple threat day coming?

I am wondering now if Iran seems too much of a problem, will we go after Cuba instead? We have an Administration that even this day, this very day, is found censoring scientific study on climate change. That is the way in which war and occupation have been handled, deception and censoring. The fear of fear was that too many people might bother to read the reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency to the Security Council and understand that an immoral war, a completely immoral war, was about to be waged.

[anne]

We "entered" Iraq to shock and awe and have been shocking and awing Iraqis ever since from the destruction of Fallujah on. We destroyed the city of Fallujah, a city of about 250,000 residents, as a reprisal. An entire city made hostage. A city where even to this day, limited and ruined as it has been and is, there is no vehicle traffic allowed.

Since when has America destroyed a city in reprisal, destroyed a city to save a city, an entire city, as though this had been 1942 and 1943 and 1944 and 1945? Fallujah has been bettered though since we lay siege in 2004 and possibly in 2008 we may even allow vehicles to enter again.

There were 1,140 air bombings in Iraq from January through September, and about 70 as of a few days ago in October. We are bombing repeatedly in urban areas, we were condemned for such bombing by a United Nations human rights panel just this October. Nonetheless, we persist.

Think of 1,140 urban air bombings in 9 months, and ask what America has come to.

[Jim]

IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH!! IMPEACH HIM NOW!!!

Stop screaming. He can't be impeached since the Democrats have caved into him on almost everything. You would need a Democrat party with backbone to impeach him. It ain't there.

[Jim]

IMPEACH GEORGE W. BUSH!! IMPEACH HIM NOW!!!

Stop screaming. He can't be impeached since the Democrats have caved into him on almost everything. You would need a Democrat party with backbone to impeach him. It ain't there.