Budget Deficit Is $1.3 Trillion, but War in Iraq Has Cost More than $3 Trillion

Both Republican and Democratic parties have cruelly betrayed the American economy by plunging the nation into a $1.3 trillion budget deficit — while spending well in excess of $3 trillion on the war in Iraq.

The shock deficit figures were released by the Department of the Treasury which said that government spending had totaled $1.26 trillion through August, one month short of the budget year due to end this month.

Spending for this month will put the deficit at around $1.3 trillion, slightly below last year’s record $1.4 trillion deficit.

At least two-thirds of the deficit has been caused by the Wall Street bailout and the other third by shortfalls in tax revenues caused by the shrinking economy.

As shocking as these figures are, they pale in comparison to the staggering amounts which the Bush and Obama governments have spent on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

According to the National Priorities Project (NPP), a research organization which describes itself as a body that “analyzes and clarifies federal data so that people can understand and influence how their tax dollars are spent,” direct costs of the war in Iraq are now in excess of $746 billion.

The NPP further reported that the cost of the war in Afghanistan is in excess of $332 billion, which means that direct military costs alone are well over a trillion dollars.

However, Linda J. Bilmes, a former chief financial officer at the Commerce Department, who teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, have produced research which has revealed that the true cost of the war in Iraq alone has totaled in excess of $3 trillion.

According to the two authors, as detailed in their work The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, the cost of the war in Iraq alone was running at $12 billion a month in 2008.

“By the time you add in the costs hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly depleted, the total tab to the federal government will almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion,” a report on the book in the Washington Post said.

Bilmes and Stiglitz exposed the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including big ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate), and the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans for the rest of their lives.

The budget deficit can therefore almost exclusively be ascribed to two factors: the Wall Street bailout and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Never before have the American people been so grossly betrayed by the powers-that-be in Washington DC.

They need to be swept from power sooner rather than later before this great nation of ours is destroyed forever. This is what the American Third Position is about: saving our nation.

Isn’t it time you got on board?

Tags: Afghanistan war, Budget deficit, Commerce Department, Council of Economic Advisers, Department of the Treasury, Iraq war, National Priorities Project

Category: Establishment News