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View Full Version : Reassessing The Cost - post Bin Laden



Zigzagman
5-11-11, 10:44am
I just don't see this as a left/right issue. Maybe it is time to really think about what we have been doing for the last decade. Supporting war is not patriotic, it is death and destruction and never a good thing albeit sometimes necessary - in this case, I think not. I have a nephew deployed in Iraq who is pretty much thinking the same thing. This discussion is taking place amongst soldiers in the privacy of their "chu" (containerized housing unit). They miss their families and their mission is not combat but supply chain stuff? They are soldiers.......

From HuffandPuff Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/11/reassessing-the-cost-of-9-11-bin-laden_n_860186.html) -

WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's death doesn’t end the post-9/11 era, but it does provide an occasion to look back at everything that’s happened since the attacks nearly 10 years ago and reassess the costs.

It’s been a long, grueling and enormously expensive time for this country, a time of endless war and massive fortification, of borrowed money and of missed opportunities. There’s the human toll. More than twice as many Americans -- over 6,000 (http://www.defense.gov/news/casualty.pdf) -- have now died in the two wars that followed 9/11 than did in the original attacks, along with more than 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans (http://www.iraqbodycount.org/). Over three million Iraqis (http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/country,,,,IRQ,,4dbe90c22b,0.html) and 400,000 Afghans (http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?page=country&docid=4db6619914) remain displaced. Several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers suffer from long-term war-related injuries and health problems, with more than 200,000 (http://www.dvbic.org/TBI-Numbers.aspx) diagnosed with traumatic brain injury alone.

And there’s the extraordinary financial toll. Indeed, even as Washington officials panic about the growing deficit, much of the problem can be traced back to 9/11 -- not to the attack itself, but to the response, and particularly to the decision to go to war in Iraq.

The actual 9/11 attacks produced insured losses of about $40 billion (http://web.docuticker.com/go/docubase/31648) and delivered a temporary blow to the economy. But that was just the very beginning of the financial hemorrhage.Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes and Nobel-Prize winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz now estimate that the two post-9/11 wars will end up costing taxpayers somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion (http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/study-wars-could-cost-4-trillion-to-6-trillion-1.120054). That includes not only money already appropriated for the military campaigns ($1.3 trillion at last count (http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL33110.pdf)), but also the immense cost of long-term health care for returning soldiers, and such things as interest payments on all the extra borrowed money and the increased volatility of oil prices since the invasion of Iraq.

"One of the main reasons that our national debt has increased so much over this past decade is because of the spending on the wars and the military buildup,” Bilmes told The Huffington Post. “All of that money has been borrowed.”

Peace

H-work
5-11-11, 11:36am
I agree with Major General Smedley D. Butler, War is a Racket.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

We don't feel the high cost of war because it's often hidden in inflation. And when we see inflation, we blame the wrong people, those greedy store owners or those greedy gas stations, instead of blaming the increase of money supply that brings the value of the dollar (and our spending power) down.

ApatheticNoMore
5-11-11, 12:20pm
They have been monetizing the debt, but it doesn't entirely show in inflation because the economy is also in shambles, very high unemployment etc. (yes commodity prices do somewhat reflect the decline of the dollar). Maybe they need this high unemployment so they can monetize the debt with impunity, yea but eventually you would think there would have to be inflation.

There are costs nonetheless, when social programs are cut because we need to reduce a deficit run up partly in war, when even the interest on the debt crowds out all the other spending. Even if we wanted to run up debt think what we could have had for it. China now has more solar power than the U.S. does (they haven't been wasting their money on wars)..

Osama Bin Laden WON! Osama Bin Laden is dead, long live Osama Bin Laden (because afterall he said he was going to bankrupt the U.S. and he did).

So Obama has a brief bump in the polls due to killing Osama and yet his ratings on the economy keep going down, so that bump is unlikely to last. Hahaha.

jp1
5-11-11, 9:52pm
So far the monetization of the debt is mainly showing up in higher commodity prices as Apatheticnomore mentions, such as oil and agricultural commodities like wheat. We see the results of oil price increases directly at the pump, but the cost of wheat is only about 2% of the cost of a loaf of bread in the US. In other countries, though, the cost of the ingredients is a much bigger part of the cost of food (presumably because they make most meals from scratch rather than prepacked stuff), so food prices in poorer nations have gone up much more than here. Also food is a larger percentage of people's budgets in poorer countries. If food prices double in them it devastates people. If food prices double in the US it adds something like 5% to the average household budget or some such small amount.

Eventually, though, if the fed keeps monetizing debt, which I think is likely, we will have to hit a tipping point where suddenly we see a lot of price inflation.