How much is Obama’s new war on Iraq and Syria going to cost? If you believe the woman who was right about the costs of the last US war on Iraq, Harvard Professor Linda J. Bilmes, it’s going to cost a fortune.
In a critically important article Professor Bilmes wrote for the Boston Globe this week, the author of The Three Trillion Dollar War (with Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) points out that although the US has already spent approximately one billion dollars thus far on President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” ISIS, the price tag is going to climb steeply -and quickly – from there.
Direct costs of the president’s plan will likely be on the order of $22 billion per year, but that is only the start.
Writes Bilmes:
In addition to the bill for military operations, there are costs associated with veterans’ benefits, depreciation of equipment, humanitarian aid, covert action, and paying (as the US frequently does) for the military efforts of our coalition ‘partners.’
This post was published at Ron Paul Institute on october 10, 2014.
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