Linda Bilmes and Joseph E. Stiglitz, in a report issued in December 2006, a revision to their earlier cost study wrote:
"In January, we estimated that the true cost of the Iraq war could reach $2 trillion, a figure that seemed shockingly high. But since that time, the cost of the war – in both blood and money – has risen even faster than our projections anticipated...
The total costs of the war, including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion. As large as these costs are, an equally large set of costs have been omitted. We have not included the costs borne by other countries, either directly (as a result of military expenditures) or indirectly (as a result of the increase in the price of oil.)"
What would you have done with two trillion dollars and four years? Surely we could have thought of something better to do with that money. After the fold, I've got some ideas.
Back in September 2002, Dr. Lawrence B. Lindsey was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal regarding the potential costs of the president's war in Iraq, and he stressed that it would be expensive. 100 to 200 billion dollars, without allies subsidizing the cost as they did in 1990-1991. (The first Gulf War cost 60 billion dollars, with all but 10 billion paid by the coalition.) He was roasted by the other Republicans and fired for his outrageous estimate. Mitchell E. Daniels said that Dr. Lindsey's estimates were too high, and the cost of the war would be roughly $50 billion to $60 billion.
USIraqProCon.org has a summary of various cost estimates for the war, it's interesting how it's spiraled out of control over time.
Two trillion dollars is a truly staggering amount of money, however.
In pennies, that would weigh roughly 625,000,000 tons, and if stacked on top of one another, the tower would stretch 98,642,600 miles - more than the distance to the sun!
If they were dollar bills instead, this page investigates things to do with a smaller sum - a mere $315 billion as their largest sum though, so we have to extrapolate from their numbers. Try to imagine that last stack six times the size - it'd stretch about 200,000 miles - almost, but not quite all the way to the moon, which is 238,900 miles away.
From a random shop on the internet, I could have 57,224,606,580 homemade apple pies delivered to my door. That's over 96,137,339,054,400 calories. I do like pie though.
We could give $302.47 to every man, woman, and child on Earth. For reference, the average income of the world is $7,030. "The developing nations of the world had an average per capita GNP of $846." For the isolationists out there, that could also end up as $6641.43 per man, woman, and child in the United States.
Okay, most of those are bad ideas, so here's a random sample of other things we could have done with a fraction of the money:
The American Medical School Association estimates in this report that "the cost of universal health care would be at least $34-$69 billion".
NASA's entire budget request for 2008 is $17.3094 billion.
The entire Department of Education's budget was $56 billion in 2006.
The World Food Programme states that 400 million children go hungry every day. It costs them 19 cents to feed one. With 2 trillion dollars, you could feed every single one of them for 72 years.
The Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy 2008 budget was a depressing $4,325,020, when we should be doing all we can do free us from our dependency on the Middle East and oil. Geothermal and Hydropower programs were cut to zero.
Now, this is all just a rhetorical study attempting to put this amount of money into perspective, and there are many other alternatives that I didn't list, from funding technological innovation, AIDS research, addressing inner city issues or fighting global climate change. We don't actually have the two trillion dollars that we're spending on the President's war so we can't actually spend it on ways to improve the world, we're borrowing most of it.
Thanks, Mr. Bush, for spending two trillion dollars that we don't have on a war we don't want. Nice legacy you've got there.
What would you do with two trillion dollars?