A new study released by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, or CSBA, said the Iraq conflict's $687 billion price tag alone now exceeds the cost of every past U.S. war except for World War II, when expenditures are adjusted for inflation.
And then there's this whopper of an error:
The Bush administration and Congress have also pursued significant tax cuts since 2001 and robust spending increases, rather than following the established approach of funding war costs by combining tax increases with curbs on domestic spending and borrowing.
Huh? What is the author talking about? Since when has a policy of program cuts and tax increases been our "established approach" for waging war? World War II is not our entire history.
As a statistical comparison with World War II, this is meaningless. Adjusting for inflation is meaningless in this context. As percentage of GDP, the true measure of the burden of war, we are nowhere near close to WW II.
Further, we expend cash to avoid spending blood--a result well worth the price, I'd say. How many years would we need to fight in Iraq to match our World War II casualties? It would take over 650 years based on our average annual casualties in Afghansitan and Iraq since 2001. Should we have used our "established approach" of fighting in order to match our "established approach" to funding?
I really get angry with stupid statistics that assume we are too stupid to notice that the statistics are stupid. Sadly, this works for many on the anti-war side who are quick to grasp any argument against the war.
UPDATE: Ah. I can often count on Strategypage to amplify something I've ranted about. Great minds think alike! First:
Recently, a U.S. think tank announced that U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere had, since September 11, 2001, cost $904 billion. That seems like a lot, and it is. But it's not a lot like it used to be. For example, World War II cost, at the time (in current dollars) over four trillion dollars. That amounted to over a third of U.S. GDP. The current war on terror is costing about one percent of GDP. So while war may appear to be getting more expensive, relative to the amount of money available, it's actually getting cheaper.
Second:
The United States has always been enthusiastic about spending enormous amounts on weapons, ammunition, supplies and equipment for the troops, with the idea of keeping U.S. casualties down while still winning the war. ... While the dollar cost of war is good for a hot headline on a slow news day, the fact that the money saved lots of American lives, never seems to make it to the front page.
And the same anti-war people who latch on to the cost of the war argument are also the ones to latch on to any story that implies we failed to anticipate and prepare for some enemy threat to our troops and condemn the military (or Bush) for failing to spend money on a program to counter the threat early enough.
The war just isn't bankrupting us. Even at war, the burden of defense spending is going down from decades past. Next plastic turkey, please.
Oh, and if I wasn't clear on how I feel, the original article's statistics are meaningless. In case I wasn't clear on that.
