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Politics : THE WHITE HOUSE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bill who wrote (16699)	2/4/2008 10:11:47 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Respond to of 25737

Yep, but probably understates the eventual tally.... (All of the delayed, yet inevitable, expenses.... decades in healthcare, costs of replenishing the military's material that has worn out, etc., etc., are not yet added to the quoted estimate.) I assume that interest costs on the borrowed money is however....

To: Bill who wrote (16699)	2/4/2008 10:51:13 AM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25737

(Been on an island somewhere for a while, Bill? :-) Direct budgetary expenditures for the Iraq Occupation have been running a bit over $12 Billion / month for over a year now. Add Afghanistan into that and you're at about $15 Billion per month in direct costs. That's $180 Billion right there. And RISING steadily... (i.e., year-over-year, each and every year has cost more then the preceding....) Then, of course, you have all of the indirect and deferred costs, which are real none-the-less. Some of them I've mentioned, and they have really big price tags attached to them: a) extremely expensive lifetime medical costs for a generation of wounded b) interest on the debt used to finance the war's ongoing costs (to be paid over decades) c) hundreds of billions to replace worn-out and or destroyed equipment, to re-equip our military d) tens of billions for equipment purchases that had been previously unexpected or unanticipated, (such as heavy armored transports, etc., etc.) This fiscal year may be the last that a $200 Billion price tag can be placed on the wars... if troop levels do not significantly fall, then fiscal 2009 will most likely exceed $200 Billion.