Iraq more pricey than Nam – ask McCain about cost

Only World War II has now cost m ore than Iraq.

The costs of maintaining a US presence in Iraq now runs a tab of about $435 million a day — $3 billion a week, or $12 billion a month. The US has siphoned some $500 billion taxpayer dollars into Iraq, for a war that was supposed to be “sharp” and brief. Interest payments add another $615 billion, and the price tag of repairing a depleted military is projected at $280 billion.

Only World War II, in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars, was more expensive, according to a recent study by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University public finance Professor Laura Bilmes. Both served in the Clinton administration.

Here’s another financial analysis.of the expensive war:

The price tag in Iraq now is more than double the cost of the Korean War and a third more expensive than the Vietnam War, which lasted 12 years. Stiglitz and Bilmes calculate that it will be at least 10 times as costly as the 1991 Gulf War and twice the cost of World War I.

Only World War II was more expensive. That four-year war — in which 16 million U.S. troops were deployed on two fronts, fighting against Germany and Japan — cost about $5 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Of course, LBJ’s “guns and butter,” along with the rise in inflation it provoked, was part of what chased him out of office.

So, if Schmuck Talk Express™ is so serious about staying there 100 years, if necessary, when is the MSM press going to ask him what he would do differently than President Bush on paying for the war.

This is yet another one of those areas where Schmuck Talk has gotten a free pass from the media.