The $2-Trillion War

The $2-Trillion War:

"04/26/05 'Harvard Magazine' -- -- War is messy, and putting a price tag on a war that stretches over years, with consequences lasting decades longer, is a staggering task. Yet in a democratic society whose citizens expect to know what they are paying for, someone has to do it. Linda Bilmes, lecturer in public policy, began the task of toting up the fiscal outlay on the Iraq war when students in her class at the Kennedy School of Government asked about its cost and Bilmes could not find any meaningful data. 'I did this because I just wanted to know,' says Bilmes, a public-finance specialist who served as assistant secretary of commerce under President Clinton. 'It is very distressing that nobody came up with a good estimate. How can you weigh the benefits against costs if you don't know what the costs are?'

Bilmes published what she found on the op-ed page of the New York Times on August 20, 2005; her article moved Joseph E. Stiglitz, University Professor at Columbia University and a 2001 Nobel laureate in economics, to ask her about expanding the analysis to include the economic effect of the war on society. Their recent paper, �The Economic Costs of the Iraq War,� presented this year at the Allied Social Science Associations meetings, concludes that projections to date vastly underestimate the extent to which the war will drain this country financially."