Way to go Mickey Mouse. Great article.
Wait a minute. You're contesting the article? Nobel-winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz says it's so, and mm says it isn't? Oh man. Who would
you put your money on?
Joseph Stiglitz against nobody, who has no citations to back him up, or
even a plausible line of logic. Hmmm. Wonder what the odds are?
You may want to look at some more of Daniel Trotta work at
http://www.newstin.co.uk/sim/uk/44989594/en-010-000849206
-----------
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080302/ts_nm/usa_economy_iraq_dc
By Daniel Trotta
Sun Mar 2, 10:03 AM ET
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Iraq war has contributed to the U.S. economic
slowdown and is impeding an economic recovery, Nobel-winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz says.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government is severely underestimating the cost of
the war, Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes write in their book, "The
Three Trillion Dollar War" (W.W. Norton), due to be published on
Monday.
The nearly 5-year-old war, once billed as virtually paying for itself
through increased Iraqi oil exports, has cost the U.S. Treasury $845
billion directly.
"It used to be thought that wars are good for the economy. No
economist really believes that anymore," Stiglitz said in an
interview.
Stiglitz and Bilmes argue the true costs are at least $3 trillion
under what they call an ultraconservative estimate, and could surpass
the cost of World War Two, which they put at $5 trillion after
adjusting for inflation.
The direct costs exclude interest on the debt raised to fund the war,
health care costs for veterans coming home, and replacing the
destroyed hardware and degraded operational capacity caused by the
war.
In addition, there are costs not accounted for in the budget such as
rising oil prices and social and macroeconomic costs, which the book
details.
To illustrate how the money could be spent elsewhere, Bilmes cited the
annual U.S. budget for autism research -- $108 million -- which is
spent every four hours in Iraq. A trillion dollars could have hired 15
million additional public school teachers for a year or provided 43
million students with four-year scholarships to public universities,
the book says.
Stiglitz and Bilmes say they were excessively conservative in
calculating the $3 trillion figure, overcompensating for their bias in
having opposed the war.
'FLOODING THE ECONOMY'
Asked if the war has contributed to the U.S. slowdown, Stiglitz said,
"Very much so."
"To offset that depressing effect, the Fed has flooded the economy
with liquidity and the regulators looked the other way when very
imprudent lending was going up," Stiglitz said. "We were living on
borrowed money and borrowed time and eventually a day of reckoning had
to come, and it has now come."
The war has also altered how the United States has reacted to its
current economic troubles, he said.
"When America's financial institutions had a problem, they had to turn
to the sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East for recapitalization,
for the bailout," he said.
"The reason was obvious. The war had led to high oil prices. The war
had meant that America had to borrow more money. There weren't sources
of liquid funds in the United States. The sources of the liquid funds
were in the Middle East," he said.
Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of
the U.S. Customs Department, said the war also limited options for the
$168 billion stimulus package signed into law by President George W.
Bush on February 13.
"We really had very little wiggle room in order to pass this because
of the fact that we're spending $16 billion a month on Iraq and
Afghanistan," Bilmes said. "Actually the country could have used a
larger fiscal stimulus but there is (no) cash to accommodate it."
The authors said they were surprised by the hidden costs their
research found, citing, for example, what they called the
underreporting of casualty figures by the Pentagon.
The official Pentagon figure of nearly 30,000 wounded in action fails
to account for an addition 40,000 service members who have required
medical attention for non-combat injuries or illness, Bilmes said. She
based her conclusion on official Defense Department data from a
restricted Web site.
-------------------------------------------
If I were the POTUS, I would have instead focused on an impending
American crisis involving the loss of competitiveness in the face of
the emerging Global Economy, and plugged the TRILLIANS into American
Human Intellectual Capital Development, through a significant upgrade
of Civil Infrastructure, Education, High Technology R&D, Fibre Optic
Infrastructure, Retraining, Health Care, so as to build UP the nation
in order so that American pre-eminance and US dollar hegemony would be
preserved, while at the same time focusing on global leadership
intiatives, to increase it's influence in the world. The economic well
being and viability of the USA's competitiveness and leadership
dominance, ought to have been the primary objective.
Oh I forgot. 9/11 "changed everything"..
--
Billy
Impeach Pelosi, Bush & Cheney to the Hague
http://angryarab.blogspot.com/
http://rachelcorriefoundation.org/
