Reaching the $500 Billion Mark - Iraq War

If the latest Iraq & Afghanistan war funding bill gets passed, the war will have cost American taxpayers more than $500 BILLION DOLLARS.

This estimate is more than 10 times more than the Bush administration anticipated before starting this war more than 4 years ago.

If you add in the $78 billion in this "emergency" funding bill, plus another $116 billion for the next fiscal year in September, the total for Iraq will be about $564 BILLION DOLLARS.

Robert Hormats, author of "The Price of Liberty":
"If it's really vital, then whatever it costs, we should pay it. If it isn't, whatever we pay is too much."

Former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey becomes scapegoat
He suggested a $200 billion estimate before the war even started. He got sacked soon after he made that prediction and was scorned by his administration colleagues.

But still the cost of Iraq was less than our other major conflicts. In today's dollars, the cost of World War II was more than $5 trillion, Korea and Vietnam each cost about $650 billion.

I would understand if this war was vital to our nation's security. Yet, could we be a bit more fiscally responsible with this conflict? Cutting taxes helps our economy, but you got domestic commitments plus the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, so we keep on borrowing. Perhaps we can handle over $9 trillion in debt, but when it passes $10 trillion, or $11 trillion, or $12 trillion? You got this plus the country's financial obligations to Social Security and Medicare. Would you like to say to our nation's seniors that we have to continue the war but looks like we have to cut your benefits down to food stamps? Maybe they can tolerate for a year or two, but what if it lasts a decade or even longer?

It cannot be just business as usual. You cannot treat war as a routine expense of the federal budget. If taxes must be raised for the wars, it must be that way instead of borrowing more and more.

So what if Bush succeeded? We accomplished the impossible in Iraq. Now Mr. President, we got about $12 trillion of national debt, how are we going to pay it off? But better yet, we got a federal deficit of a few hundred billion each year? It will take decades to cut our debts back to manageable levels, but who knows if peace would last that long. Are you willing to tell the American taxpayers that taxes need to be raised in order to help pay off this gigantic debt?