Bush’s request for $87 billion for new war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan is generating plenty of buzz on Capitol Hill. The administration will probably get the money it’s asking for, but lawmakers are going to make the White House jump through some hoops first.
Some critics are beginning to note, for example, just how much $87 billion is.
This one-time defense expenditure, which will be spent on top of the money Congress already allocated for the war, is more than the federal government spends on many domestic programs. The $87 billion is almost exactly triple the amount the federal government will commit to public education this year. It’s also more than twice as much as the Bush administration is willing to spend on improving domestic defense.
Indeed, states are enduring their worst fiscal crises since WWII with most state governments struggling with massive deficits. Yet, if one combined every deficit in every state in the Union, it’s $78 billion, $9 billion less than Bush requested for this latest round of war spending.
As the Washington Post reported this morning, the combined costs of money spent and requested by the White House for war costs is now $166 billion. In inflation-adjusted costs, this means Bush’s so-called War on Terrorism costs more than the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish American War, and the Persian Gulf War combined.
But that’s not even the funny part. As the LA Times reported today, the administration’s $87 billion tab doesn’t even meet it’s own projections on reconstruction costs. That’s right, it’s a low-ball number!
As the Times explained, “Administration officials said President Bush’s emergency spending request…still left a reconstruction funding gap of as much as $55 billion.”
Ready for this one? The White House is hoping all of those other countries — the ones in “Old Europe” that we dismissed as irrelevant in the build-up towards war in the spring — will step up and pay for the rest. (“Yeah, about those ‘Freedom Fries.’ We were just kidding around! So, do you have an extra $55 billion to spare for a war you never thought was necessary to begin with?”)
Bathsheba Crocker, co-director of the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the administration will almost certainly never get that kind of money from countries that used to be our allies.
“From what we have been hearing about the donors conference, they’ll be lucky if they get $1 billion,” Crocker told the Times. (He’s referring to the international donors conference scheduled for Oct. 23-24 in Madrid.)
And you know what that means. The $166 billion for war costs could still go up.