$3 trillion war cost passed on to future generations
Joseph Stiglitz on the massive burden that the Iraq War will impose upon
those who had nothing to do with its genesis
those who had nothing to do with its genesis
With March 20 marking the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, it’s time to take stock of what has happened. In our new book “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Harvard’s Linda Bilmes and I estimate the economic cost of the war to the U.S. to be $3 trillion, and the costs to the rest of the world to be another $3 trillion — far higher than the estimates the Bush administration gave before the war. The administration said the war would cost $50 billion. The U.S. now spends that amount in Iraq every three months. For one-sixth of the cost of the war, the U.S. could put its Social Security system on sound footing for more than a half-century, without cutting benefits or raising contributions.
