Iraq war will cost $1 trillion or more

Has Bush mentioned this in his Plan for Victory? Iraq war will cost $1 trillion: experts BOSTON, Jan. 6 (UPI) -- A new study by two academic experts suggests the costs of the Iraq war will be much higher than previously reckoned. In a paper presented to this week's Allied Social Sciences Association annual meeting in Boston, Mass., Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes and Columbia University professor and Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz calculated that the war is likely to cost the United States a minimum of nearly $1 trillion and potentially over $2 trillion. The study expands on traditional budgetary estimates by including costs such as lifetime disability and health care for the over 16,000 injured, one fifth of whom have serious brain or spinal injuries. It then goes on to analyze the costs to the economy, including the economic value of lives lost and the impact of factors such as higher oil prices that can be partly attributed to the conflict in Iraq. "Shortly before the war, when administration economist Larry Lindsey suggested that the costs might range between $100 and $200 billion, administration spokesmen quickly distanced themselves from those numbers," Stiglitz said. "But in retrospect, it appears that Lindsey's numbers represented a gross underestimate of the actual costs." Our ancestors will have to pay this bill for generations because Bush has it all on credit. From UPI