Bring It On!

A Very Expensive War

May 31st, 2006 | by Liberal Jarhead |

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. ~ George Orwell

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. ~ Ronald Reagan

Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear. ~ General Douglas MacArthur, U.S. Army

The Department of Defense is the behemoth . . . With an annual budget larger than the gross domestic product of Russia, it is an empire. ~The 9/11 Commission Report

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. ~ President Dwight D. Eisenhower, former General, U.S. Army

We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron . . . Is there no other way the world may live? ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

A couple of days ago my wife Jan invited me to a presentation on the costs of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan by Senator Dede Feldman of our New Mexico state legislature. In a state legislature that is, if possible, more of a clown convention than the national House and Senate, Senator Feldman is a striking exception, someone I would love to see sticking up for us in D.C. the way she does in Santa Fe. A lot of the information in this post comes straight from her presentation – I’m adding some additional things I’ve gleaned in researching this and some thoughts based what I’ve seen both as a Marine and as a psychotherapist.

First, in looking at the war’s cost in dollars we’re setting aside for the moment the moral and ethical issues about how we started it. We’re looking for information we can use in persuading people who have supported the war to change their minds, and that takes objective facts rather than value judgments – not that the value judgments are less legitimate or the war is less of a tragedy and a crime. Yesterday was Memorial Day, and those other factors are heavy on my mind as on those of many others. But those issues have been eloquently addressed by some others in recent days, so I’m focusing on this.

When the Bushies rolled out their marketing campaign to sell this war, they did talk about money along with the phantom WMDs and mythical al Qaeda links. But they lied. They said, straight-faced, that the war would probably last weeks rather than months, would cost between fifty and sixty billion dollars. The president’s own economic adviser told him it could cost two to three times that much but was ignored and discredited.

What has actually happened? The war has lasted years rather than months, and there are no signs that it will end before Bush leaves office in two years, seven months, and 20 days – by then it will have lasted almost six years. Some 2,500 of our men and women in uniform have died and several times that many have been wounded. And Bush just asked for another $72.4 billion in supplemental funding for this war, which will bring the total cost so far to over $315 billion. And the pace of the war and the spending on the war is rising – insurgent attacks in 2005 rose 30 percent over the number in 2004. In that same time span, the number of attacks using car bombs and roadside improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the deadliest threats our troops face, nearly doubled.

We get blasé about these huge numbers when we talk about spending at the national level. Let’s put it in perspective. According to Infoplease, the average per capita income for American workers in 2005 was $34,586. For my state it was $27,644 – New Mexico is one of the poorest states in the country. Check your state here. Anyway, if you are that average worker and you take your annual wages in one lump payment in $100 bills, you’d have a stack of 345 Ben Franklins with four twenties, a five and a one left over. It takes about 800 bills of U.S. currency to make a stack a foot high, so you’d have a stack just a bit over five inches tall, about the size of a couple of boxes of personal checks or a two-pound hunk of cheese. For the four and a half years this war’s been going on now, call it nine pounds of cheese.

If that were your average pay over your entire working life, and you put in a solid fifty years, you’d have $1,729,300 – a stack of hundreds just under 22 feet high. Lay that stack on its side and it’s about as long as a Humvee. You could fit it all into one of those handy cardboard packing boxes about a foot wide, 20 inches long, and 18 inches deep – it would fit nicely on the floor of your car on the passenger side as you drove home that last time, representing your life from that high-school job sacking groceries to the day you empty your desk into cardboard boxes and drive home that last time to start learning about Social Security and Medicare.

If you did the same thing with 315 billion dollars, it would make a stack of hundreds almost 746 miles high – if you tipped that stack on its side it would reach from New York City to Atlanta. Try packing it in the same kind of box and you’ll need 164,063 boxes – enough to cover a football field to a height of over ten feet.

Since the war started in Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, when we count this latest supplemental funding, we will have shoveled an average of $185,621,685 per day into this bottomless pit. That’s the entire lifetime earnings of over 107 of us average Americans, every day, and it’s accelerating. Most of that money has gone to contractors like Halliburton or just disappeared with no one willing or able to say what happened to it. And the spending is accelerating and will speed up even more.

In the process these people have taken the strong, capable military they inherited from Clinton and run it into the ground, both equipment and people. Our best service men and women are retiring, resigning or leaving when their enlistments end. That’s another cost.

Harking back to the quotes at the top of this piece, especially those from President and General Dwight Eisenhower, it’s worth looking at what we might be doing with this money if we weren’t spending it in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here are some possibilities.

It costs about $4,500 a year to provide health coverage for an average American. We could have covered 70 million people – that would just about cover every child in the country for a year, or 23 million for three years.

Head Start classroom seats cost about seven grand a year apiece. The spending on this war would have paid for 15 million kids to be in Head Start every year for three years. Considering that the data show that those kids would do better in school from then on and would be less likely to drop out and more likely to be higher-income taxpayers as adults, that loss will be felt for the next six or seven decades, until they reach retirement age.

We have a problem with homelessness in America, not just for individuals but for families. At a hundred thousand apiece, we could have built affordable housing for over three million families. Those homes would have continued to serve communities for decades, too.

W talks about education, and they love to trot out the fact that his Stepford wife was a teacher. We have run-down and overcrowded schools all over America. Well, it costs about seven million to build a new elementary school – we could have been building 26 of those schools EVERY DAY since this thing started.

Looking at the other end of the educational spectrum, with college scholarships costing an average of about $3,500 a year, we could have been putting 90 million more people in college! What would that translate into in terms of payoff in increased productivity and tax revenues over the decades ahead?

Finally, not that this list couldn’t be a lot longer (we didn’t talk about the WIC program to feed mothers and infants, the EPA and clean water, or low-income home heating and cooling assistance in the face of more extreme weather every year), let’s look at two aspects of homeland security that are a lot closer to home and a lot more likely to actually keep Americans safe here in the United States – cops and the people who inspect shipping containers. At starting wages of about $40K and $51K respectively, we could have hired 2.6 million more cops over these past three years, or two million more container inspectors. I am a Marine and I love Marines and soldiers too, but I know those extra cops and container inspectors would make me safer from, say, a nuke going off in Baltimore à la Sum of All Fears than all the Marines and soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan can.

The costs of this war look as if they’re going to keep rising. As noted earlier, the so-called insurgents are getting better at killing us, and it’s getting more expensive all the time to try to keep our guys and gals in one piece (not that we’re trying TOO hard, as shown by the disgraceful fiasco over body armor). Also, the pace of replacing equipment that’s been either destroyed or just plain worn out is picking up. They’re starting to destroy M-1 tanks more often, and those are expensive. Your life’s earnings wouldn’t even pay for a week’s worth of ammo for one.

And even though one of the ways those rascals have been paying for both the war and the tax cuts for themselves and their sponsors has been to cut per capita spending on veterans’ benefits, they won’t be able to keep that up much longer – we’re seeing too many people coming home with devastating physical and mental wounds that will cost a fortune to care for, for the rest of their days. You can’t take a lap and shake off a traumatic brain injury or amputation. It will be a situation unseen since the years after the Civil War, when the states across the South spent some 30 per cent of their budgets on prosthetic limbs for their Confederate veterans. And judging by the trends we’re seeing, the feds will try to shove as much of the cost as they can down to the state and local level.

A note here: I consider the people who work in the V.A. to be among my heroes. They do hard and wrenching work and more often than not they do it diligently, cheerfully, and very skillfully. I am indebted to the wonderful staff at the V.A. hospital here in Albuquerque, as are both my brothers; my life would be much harder without them. But they are only human, and all they can do is all they can do. The working people of the V.A. are being betrayed by this administration every bit as much as are the active military people we see more often in the news.

Right now, military spending is the single biggest item in the federal budget, at 29 cents of every dollar. Health is next, at 20 cents, and then interest on the growing national debt, at 19 cents. Income security (read unemployment – could it have anything to do with NAFTA, CAFTA, WTO, etc.?) is at seven cents, and nothing else is even a nickel – not education, vets’ benefits, housing, or anything else.

The jokers in the deck, though, are these two facts: first, that lead item, the military budget, doesn’t include this war! When it comes to the budget, everyone in D.C. puts on their blinders and pretends that as of next year, we will no longer be spending money on this war. It’s as if we had two separate military budgets, one of them under the table. And joker number two is the fact that because of the war, that debt and the interest we owe on it is growing far faster than income. Anyone out there who hasn’t heard of compound interest?

Here are some links that have useful information for anyone who wants to pursue this, or frame questions for your own legislators – again, a thank you to Senator Feldman, who provided these:

http://www.costofwar.com
http://www.nationalpriorities.org
http://www.sensiblepriorities.org
http://www.willwand.org
http://www.cbpp.org
http://democrats.senate.gov
http://senatorfeldman.typepad.com

So – before you vote next fall, I hope you’ll do three things. First, please do some thinking and decide how you feel about the effect of this war on your financial security and the future of your children and grandchildren, and what you think the government should do from here on. Second, do some digging and find out what the candidates in your state and district are saying they will do about this if elected. If they aren’t saying, bug them and get them to say something. Third, vote for whoever is saying they’ll do whatever you think should be done. If you want the status quo, vote for those who brought this about and support continuing it. If you want change, vote accordingly.

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