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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (248429)	11/13/2007 10:57:09 PM
From: Ruffian	Respond to of 281500

like i said, the DEMS hard @ work, go gettum Pelosi!!!

To: stockman_scott who wrote (248429)	11/13/2007 11:00:32 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

A year ago, Nobel economics Prize winner estimated the cost at $2T. Dems have been too slow on this and hardly original. How did you arrive at the $2-trillion figure? There were three parts to the calculations that I made with Linda Bilmes, a professor of public finance at Harvard. The first part is based on actual expenditures—the impact on the federal budget. But the budget doesn’t include a lot of expenditures we will be making in the future as a result of the war today, like paying for the health care and disability benefits of all the people who have been injured. These are lifetime expenditures, but they aren’t included in the $600 million a year the Defense Department expects to spend on Iraq. They’re just talking about the hardware of war. The second part of our calculations estimates future expenditures to replace what we lose in the war. The budget includes spending for new ammunition, but not the wear and tear on weapons systems. Eventually the weapons must be replaced, but the administration doesn’t count that as part of the projected cost of the war. A third important category is a little more hidden. The defense budget has gone way up, beyond the money earmarked for Iraq. You have to ask why. It’s not like the Cold War has broken out again. We infer that they are hiding a lot of the Iraq expenditures in the defense budget. We only attribute a small fraction of the increase to Iraq, but it would be hard to explain them any other way than the war...