Cashing in the War Dividend (Jo Comerford)

by Dollars and Sense

TomDispatch has a new piece by Jo Comerford, director of the National Priorities Project. See below for Tom's introduction to the piece.

Comerford also appears in one part of a six-part video series from Brave New Films, Rethink Afghanistan. Part Three, which features Comerford and also Linda Bilmes (who co-wrote The Three Trillion Dollar War with Joseph Stiglitz), addresses the costs of the war in Afghanistan.

Both Comerford's article and the video series go well with Tom's own piece Who's Next?: Lessons from the Long War and a Blowback World, which argues that the "Long War" (the term members of the Bush administration wanted to give to the global war on terror) is what the United States has already been fighting in the Middle East for the past 30-odd years. —cs

If you want a picture of how Washington deals with American war-making today, check out a moment from NBC's October 11th "Meet the Press." David Gregory, the show's moderator, is conducting a round-table discussion with former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers, Senator Lindsey Graham, Senator Carl Levin, and retired General Barry McCaffrey (one of those generals who now spends his time on television explaining our wars to us). At one point, Gregory asks: "Can we beat the Taliban?" General McCaffrey's reply starts this way: "Well, I, I think in 10 years of $5 billion a month and with a significant front-end security component, we can leave an Afghan national army and police force and a viable government and roads and universities. But it's a time constraint that we can't change things in 18 to 24 months. So I think we got to lower expectations."

Now, if you were a normal citizen, you might begin frantically calculating: $5 billion a month... 12 months in a year... $60 billion a year... times 10 years... $600 billion dollars. If, in fact, the number of U.S. troops or trainers and advisors rises significantly and the U.S. commitment to the war rises as well, this will surely prove a gross underestimate. But leaving that aside, you, the normal, reasonable human being, might at this point say something like: "Hold on, general, $600 billion more dollars? Ten years? And where's that money coming from? And is that really how you want to invest taxpayer dollars -- in another supposedly too-big-to-fail bailout?" Or, of course, you might just jump up and yell, "Have you lost your senses?"

But of course this is Washington where such numbers for American war-fighting are so ho-hum, so run-of-the-mill, that none of the other participants even thinks to comment on or question them or stops for a second in wonder. In fact, when McCaffrey is done, here's how Gregory begins his response: "Just with, with very little time left, I want to get to two other issues. The president spoke last night at the Human Rights Campaign dinner and spoke about 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell'..." And so it goes in "wartime" Washington.

Jo Comerford, a TomDispatch newcomer, runs the National Priorities Project, whose mission is to analyze "complex federal spending data and translate it into easy-to-understand information about how federal tax dollars are spent." Its site even has a "cost of war" counter, constantly twirling as the dollars rise in dizzying fashion. Here, as a numbers cruncher, she makes the most basic point of all: Whoever may be losing in our country, others are cashing in their chips and I'm not just talking about Goldman Sachs. After all, there's also the "war dividend." —Tom

Cashing in the War Dividend
The Joys of Perpetual War
By Jo Comerford

So you thought the Pentagon was already big enough? Well, what do you know, especially with the price of the American military slated to grow by at least 25% over the next decade?

Forget about the butter. It's bad for you anyway. And sheer military power, as well as the money behind it, assures the country of a thick waistline without the cholesterol. So, let's sing the praises of perpetual war. We better, since right now every forecast in sight tells us that it's our future.

The tired peace dividend tug boat left the harbor two decades ago, dragging with it laughable hopes for universal health care and decent public education. Now, the mighty USS War Dividend is preparing to set sail. The economic weather reports may be lousy and the seas choppy, but one thing is guaranteed: that won't stop it.

The United States, of course, long ago captured first prize in the global arms race. It now spends as much as the next 14 countries combined, even as the spending of our rogue enemies and former enemies -- Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria -- much in the headlines for their prospective armaments, makes up a mere 1% of the world military budget. Still, when you're a military superpower focused on big-picture thinking, there's no time to dawdle on the details.

And be reasonable, who could expect the U.S. to fight two wars and maintain more than 700 bases around the world for less than the $704 billion we'll shell out to the Pentagon in 2010? But here's what few Americans grasp and you aren't going to read about in your local paper either: according to Department of Defense projections, the baseline military budget -- just the bare bones, not those billions in war-fighting extras -- is projected to increase by 2.5% each year for the next 10 years. In other words, in the next decade the basic Pentagon budget will grow by at least $133.1 billion, or 25%.

When it comes to the health of the war dividend in economically bad times, if that's not good news, what is? As anyone at the Pentagon will be quick to tell you, it's a real bargain, a steal, at least compared to the two-term presidency of George W. Bush. Then, that same baseline defense budget grew by an astonishing 38%.

If the message isn't already clear enough, let me summarize: it's time for the Departments of Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Labor, Education, and Veterans Affairs to suck it up. After all, Americans, however unemployed, foreclosed, or unmedicated, will only be truly secure if the Pentagon is exceedingly well fed. According to the Office of Management and Budget, what that actually means is this: 55% of next year's discretionary spending -- that is, the spending negotiated by the President and Congress -- will go to the military just to keep it chugging along.

Read the rest of the article.

Read Tom Engelhardt's Who's Next?.

Watch Rethink Afghanistan. (Not for the faint of heart.)

Labels: Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, Jo Comerford, Joseph Stiglitz, Linda Bilmes, militarism, Tom Engelhardt

 

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10/21/2009 03:11:00 PM 0 comments

 

The Three Trillion Dollar War

by Dollars and Sense

Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have updated their estimate of the costs to the United States (direct and indirect) of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in an article in yesterday's Times of London. We reported on an early version of their original findings in our Economy in Numbers column in the July/August 2006 issue of D&S.

Stiglitz and Bilmes's research on this topic have estimated the costs of the wars in three categories: (1) direct costs to the U.S. government (including Department of Defense spending, spending by the Veterans Administration, demobilization costs, and interest on debt incurred because of the wars); (2) economic costs that are not borne by the government (e.g. the lost economic contributions of reservists while they are deployed, or after they are dead or injured); and (3) larger macroeconomic costs to the U.S. economy as a whole (e.g. those resulting from increases in the price of oil, plausibly due to instability in the Middle East resulting from the war).

According to the initial conclusions of their research (released in February of 2006; they didn't publish the study until later that year), the first two categories of costs (direct and indirect--not including the larger macroeconomic costs), could be conservatively estimated at between $937 billion and $1.5 trillion. They estimated the macroeconomic costs to the United States as "are potentially very large; possibly even a multiple of the direct costs," that is, possibly several trillion dollars beyond the costs to the government.

The article in yesterday's London Times estimates the total costs more definitively at $3 trillion:

From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify how much we have been spending - and how much we will, in the end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.

The article goes on to estimate the costs to the UK:

[T]he budgetary cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2010 will total more than £18 billion. If we include the social costs, the total impact on the UK will exceed £20 billion.

(The added social costs to the UK are proportionately lower than those in the United States because the UK is a net exporter of oil.)

Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate that the current Iraq war will cost ten times the first Gulf war, and one-third more than the Vietnam War.

The Bush administration's cost estimates in advance of the war were of course drastically lower than the actual costs. Donald Rumsfeld estimated the costs at $50 to $60 billion, and was outraged when Bush's economic advisor Larry Lindsey said it would cost $200 billion. According to Stiglitz and Bilmes, Lindey downplayed his higher estimate by saying that "The successful prosecution of the war would be good for the economy."

And shouldn't defense spending stimulate the economy? Shouldn't we expect, on Keynesian grounds, that all the money the government is lavishing on the war would stimulate the economy? Yet we are sinking into recession. In the upcoming (March/April) issue of D&S, Arthur MacEwan will answer this question in our "Ask Dr. Dollar" column.

Labels: Afghanistan, Iraq, Joseph Stiglitz, Linda Bilmes, war

 

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2/24/2008 09:25:00 PM 0 comments