Is the Price of the Iraq War Really Worth It?
November 21 2006
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According to this excellent MSNBC piece, the amount of money being spent in Iraq ranges from $255 million a day to more than $7 billion per month, with a final price tag expected to exceed $1 trillion.
The National Priorities Project, which uses a calculation based on U.S. budget appropriations (looking at what has already been spent and extrapolating the level of future spending based on this), estimates that the total money spent or allocated comes to about $255 million per day.
That is a little less than $1.8 billion a week, including both military and non-military spending.
Other estimates, however, also factor in other costs, such as the financial loss resulting from the deaths of soldiers, as well as future costs that do not show up in current appropriations, like equipment replacement and interest on the deficits being created.
If you add those and other costs to the total tab, the cost of the war is as much as $7.1 billion a month, and the total cost could top $1 trillion.
Not included in either of those accounting methods are the financial and economic impact on Iraq. Oil production dropped from more than 2.5 million barrels a day in 2001 to less than 1.5 million in 2003. Further, the loss of life to the Iraqi people could be in the hundreds of thousands.