Shuck Bush

10 March 2008

When I looked at the statistics for the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan it was a real eye opener. A Nobel Prize-winning economist stated that the costs of the Iraq war could reach $5 trillion. Wow, I have a hard time imaging $ 5 trillion. The Bush administration’s war costs are beyond my comprehension. What strikes me first are all the good things that could be done with that money, secondly I think of how long my children and their children will be paying, in one way or another, for such spending. A single-week estimate comes to about $3.5 billion.

I’m afraid to look more closely what it’s being spent on. All the baloney in Congress about “for the troops” boils down to about $350 million a week for pay and benefits for uniformed military personnel and they are being shortchanged right and left. It makes me sick to realize that $1.4 billion is going to war contractors with very little oversight. A lot of that money is being wasted every week on wrong kinds of equipment at outrageous prices. On top of that, there are often delays in getting it to the battlefield. I haven’t even mentioned the trigger happy guys in organizations like Blackwater and Triple Canopy. I’ve heard that they make as much as $7,500 a week, ten times what most U.S. enlisted military make and there are 5-6 thousand armed contract yahoos in Iraq.

It is estimated that there are more non-military contract employees in Iraq alone — about 180,000 – more than there are U.S. troops, many of which are poorly paid non-military sub contractors, cooking meals, doing laundry, and cleaning latrines. Who in Congress is really looking into the huge amount of war funding and just where and how it is being spent? Do they even care? Here I sit stewing about how my tax dollars are being spent and wondering if the next president will fix or add to the current situation.

This whole blog considers the cost of war in dollars, the cost in lives is something that I have ranted about many times and will continue to do until someone puts an end to this unnecessary war.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 10:39 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.