The $2 Trillion Nightmare

The $2 Trillion Nightmare

By BOB HERBERT
Published: March 4, 2008
We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

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What is really strange is that in a time when a President committed troops into two foreign nations to wage war, he cut taxes for the rich. We now have more billionaires than we did before Afghanistan was invaded and before Iraq was invaded. What we also have is higher debt, less services for the American people, but the most troubling aspect of all of this is there is less for the wounded and for the veterans of both military actions the same President not only ordered but demanded the right to continue both of them as he pleases. Doesn't make much sense does it? No one in their right mind would treat the troops or the veterans this way and then further the assault on them by saying everyone else in the country has to support him if they want to claim they support the troops.

We have less doctors and nurses working for the DOD and the VA than we did before 9-11. There are less service representatives. There are less mental health professionals. There are less IT processors working on claims. All the way around there are more veterans and wounded veterans needing help and less to take care of them. But this has all been ok to the GOP in office and not worth raising hell about for the Democrats. When it comes to supporting the troops when it really does matter to them, we suck at it. We would have demanded a lot more out of the Congress a long time ago if we were really supporting the troops.