| Author | Message | | dangerousdna | | Posted: Sun Mar 09, 2003 6:56 am Post subject: Iraq War Will Cost $10 Billion in 1st Month |
| The U.S. had a federal deficit of $158 billion last year following
four consecutive years of surpluses.
From Bloomberg, 3/8/03:
http://quote.bloomberg.com/fgcgi.cgi?T=uspolitics_news.ht&s=APmo2BhReSXJhcSBX
Iraq War Will Cost $10 Billion in First Month, Congress Told
By Craig Torres and Heidi Przybyla
Washington, March 8 (Bloomberg) --
A war with Iraq will cost U.S. taxpayers $10 billion the first month,
and $8 billion every month after the initial attack, the Congressional
Budget Office said in a report on federal spending plans.
President George W. Bush has resisted putting a price on the conflict,
saying in a press conference Thursday that the White House would
present the cost of the war to the public ``at the appropriate time''
in supplemental legislation.
The benefits of an invasion ``if, in fact, we go forward and are
successful, are also immeasurable,'' Bush told a reporter at the
briefing after declining to state a dollar figure.
``How do you measure the benefit of freedom in Iraq?''
Projections on the costs of a conflict are politically sensitive for
Bush because taxpayers are struggling with a flagging economy at home
that lost 308,000 jobs last month, the most since the 2001 terrorist
attacks.
Many state governments are considering higher taxes to avoid cutting
services as they face a collective budget shortfall estimated by a
legislators' group to be more than $112 billion.
Tensions over Iraq also sent oil prices to $37.78 a barrel on the New
York Mercantile exchange Friday, a 12-year high.
The rise in energy prices results in a direct cost to consumers in the
form of higher gasoline prices.
Post-Combat Cost
The CBO, a non-partisan research arm of Congress, estimated that the
cost of deploying troops will be $14 billion, and the cost of bringing
them home could total $9 billion.
The New York Times reported today on the round-trip cost of moving
forces.
``The incremental cost following combat operations could vary from
about $1 billion to $4 billion a month,'' the CBO said in the study
posted on its Web site, a figure that is in line with a range of
estimates from private economists.
The CBO said there are many contingencies to its estimates, such as
how long the war lasts, whether the use of chemical and biological
weapons might involve decontamination costs, and the possibility of a
sustained occupation.
``Attaching estimates to any such costs would be quite speculative,''
the CBO said in its report.
The U.S. had a federal deficit of $158 billion last year following
four consecutive years of surpluses.
_________________________________________________________
And 308,000 Americans lost their jobs last month.
Nearly 2 million American jobs have been lost since hiring peaked in
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