What Would $3 TRILLION Dollars Buy America? Iraq? Safety?

I heard an excellent couple of interviews with both authors of this book on NPR’s “Fresh Air”. You can listen to Joseph Stiglitz here and Linda Bilmes interview here. The website also has some excerpts from the book.

But this, from Robert Koehler at Smirking Chimp caught my eye this morning (now added here for your lunch-time reading pleasure):

Losing the future: What else could we do with $3 trillion?

A certain reverence is required just to approach the book’s title: “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict” by noted economists Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes. I can see why they understated it.

The pulse of outrage beats behind the cold calculations in this concise volume, newly published by Norton. We’re not just “losing” this tragic, arrogantly unplanned war in the conventional sense of failing to subdue our enemies — we’re committing slow socioeconomic suicide with its open-ended pursuit, losing, as we plunge recklessly into debt over it, our options, our ability to choose. We’re losing the future.

“Because of the war, the national deficit is $2 trillion higher,” Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001, told me. “At 5 percent interest, that’s $100 billion a year, year after year after year — forever!”

Such numbers are beyond the scope of the human imagination. To begin putting the war into financial perspective, Stiglitz suggested that we need a new unit of account: “Think of what things would cost in terms of hours, days, weeks of fighting.”

For instance, he said, “Three years ago we had a financial crisis with the Social Security system. For one-sixth of an Iraq war, you could have fixed Social Security for the next 50 to 75 years.”

Or how about health insurance for children? Remember when President Bush vetoed a bill to expand it? “We’re talking about days of fighting in Iraq,” Stiglitz said.

Or, hmm, what about the fact that suddenly one of every 150 children is being diagnosed with autism? The cost of serious research on this issue? “Four hours of an Iraq war!”

(Note: The American Friends Service Committee has a Web page devoted to the Iraq war as a unit of account, at afsc.org/cost/banners.htm.)

Before we begin a serious waltz with the current war numbers that Stiglitz and Bilmes force us to confront in their book, let’s ponder some far easier stats. Remember Gulf War I? We drove Saddam out of Kuwait, racking up huge kills in the process and sustaining a mere 148 of our own dead and another 467 injured. Combat operations lasted a month. What’s more, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait paid for most of it — it was practically a free war.

Except, as Stiglitz and Bilmes point out, in the aftermath of this quickie, yellow-ribbon-festooned war, vets started getting sick — started dying — of mysterious maladies that came to be called Gulf War Syndrome. Some 17 years later, “the United States still spends over $4.3 billion each year paying compensation, pension and disability benefits to more than 200,000 veterans of the Gulf War,” they write. “We have already spent over $50 billion in Gulf War I disability benefits.”

Almost two decades later, our tax dollars are still disappearing down the gaping maw of this monthlong war. Now, consider that the current Iraq war is five years old this month and counting (John McCain is ready to go at it for another hundred), and we’ve been in Afghanistan so far for six and a half years. The secret and terrible costs of these wars are growing, growing, growing; and they are exponentially greater than the still enormously expensive, and forgotten, Gulf War I.

Just the cost of care for physically and emotionally injured vets for these two protracted wars — in which our GIs are being forced to return for two, three and even more tours of duty — will run, the authors estimate, to more than $700 billion. And, they note, the care the government refuses to pay for doesn’t simply disappear as a cost. It falls on the families themselves. Someone pays it, so it’s part of the total.

Stiglitz and Bilmes do more than ferret out the operational, medical and other war costs hidden in various parts of the national budget. When they also factor in reasonable estimates of the macroeconomic costs (including interest on our staggering debt, the war-triggered increases in the price of oil), they are forced to add another $2 trillion to the cost of the war.

When they press on with their analysis and begin calculating the global costs as well — including such arcane and disconcerting calculations as the value of an Iraqi life figured, in terms of lost income generation, at 7 percent of an American life — suddenly there’s another $6 trillion. Add it up, if you dare, and you wind up in the neighborhood of $11 trillion. Helluva neighborhood.

But there’s more to the book than numbers. The authors are clearly aware that to a certain extent they are calculating the incalculable: the value of our lost national credibility (”We have become toxic”); the value of human life; the value of shattered hopes. For instance, “The majority of Iraqi children are not attending school,” they note at one point.

The authors move on, but this is where I’ll stop. If we truly face up to what we’ve done, we’ll never go to war again.

These authors go to great pains to be “conservative” in their estimations. Probably overdoing it to be on the “safe side”. What you do not hear from the administration (or much anyone else, for that matter) is all the hidden costs associated with this bogus, lying war.

All the issues we have here and they are pouring OUR money down that endless drain of war profiteering and oil/land grabs.

Finally, hope for those who suffer from mental health issues

House Passes Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act

March 5th, 2008 by Jesse Lee

The House has just passed H.R. 1424, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act by a vote of 268-148. This bipartisan legislation will end discrimination against patients seeking treatment for mental illnesses by prohibiting insurers and group health plans from imposing treatment or financial limitations when they offer mental health benefits that are more restrictive from those applied to medical and surgical services.

Some consider me mentally deficient and be that as it may, I do live daily with mental illness. The problem is that simply using those words can instill fear and misunderstanding, certain stigmas associated with the words that do not help the situation, at all. More and more progress is made in all sorts of areas (the mental illnesses are varied and at times, interrelated), especially medicines (no matter what that freak Tom Cruise says).

In my case a family member is Bi-Polar (manic-depressive). Her life can be amazingly rewarding and fun… or super-depressing and scary. In her case, she is a rare type called a “rapid cycler” which means she can go from one extreme to the next daily, or even several times in a day. Most manic-depressives do not cycle that fast and it is devastating when they do cycle (no matter the frequency). If they cycle fast, the ups and downs happen so quickly, they can’t adjust and end up living a roller coaster ride of emotions.

They tend to “feel” more than normal people, in that, every emotion is overbearing… causing one to make decisions that can be rash and dangerous… or, may make them take the opposite tact and never make a decision, at all, in fear of messing up. Many times, anger or fear can be like “the first time” they ever experience it, as if it is groundhog day over and over, never learning from what happened the day before.

One of the worst things is to see them be depressed and have a manic phase at the same time. Being mentally forced to do something when that “something” depresses you. And not being able to control yourself. Having to clean the kitchen, while crying your eyes out and not being able to stop either. Nothing is routine and holding a regular job is most difficult (although certainly achievable).

Very few people know about my situation and how it affects the loved ones (I’m not bitching or asking for sympathy) who live with it. Like everything else in life, you just make do with the situation and try to improve it. In my case, I end up taking up a lot of the slack and “walk on eggshells” most of my life (I cook most meals, earn the living, help with our daughter as much as possible, juggling work). Since I travel with work, this makes juggling even harder and I rely on her taking her meds correctly (which is one of the biggest obstacles for a Bi-polar person, imo) and my parents-in-law (who are both in their 60’s and 70’s).

One of the issues is the stigma that insurance companies have been able to put on this illness. If you try to buy insurance or lose your insurance at work, there is absolutely no chance, whatsoever, to have an insurance company sign you because of the pre-existing condition. No evaluation… just NO. Since I am self-employed, I pay for my own insurance and basically, due to her illness (for my daughter and I combined are less than half of my wife’s premium) I pay almost $1,200/month in premiums. There is no real reason for this, except the stigma and the fact that health insurance companies rule our healthcare in America. For the last three years straight, I have had to spend $20K-$30K out of my pocket (and it is breaking us, believe me).

By and large, this is because of her “condition”, that if medicated as she religiously does, there is no real issue that warrants such extra costs. So, this is a start by congress (if it gets to Bush, it may be vetoed, since he is such a stupid prick), but the real answer is to dump the for profit system we have and build the very best single payer, not-for-profit system in the world, where EVERY American is covered and the fat cat assholes in insurance stop making millions in profit off of our sicknesses and accidents.

Best healthcare in the world? Only if you are a mindless, idiotic, sycophantic, Bushie Fool.

Sxephil Interviews Mike Gravel

I thought I’d never admit it, but I love PhillyDTV. Phil is hilarious.

You’ve just been Philled in.