Ron Paul: Iraq War Will Cost $3.5 Trillion
It's difficult to fully comprehend the total price tag of the Iraq war, but Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has made some staggering calculations, coming up with a whopping $3.5 trillion -- including "hidden costs" such as interest on the money we're borrowing, and long-term health care for vets.
It’s difficult to fully comprehend the total price tag of the Iraq war, but Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul has made some staggering calculations, coming up with a whopping $3.5 trillion — “including ‘hidden costs” such as interest on the money we’re borrowing, and long-term health care for vets.
WAIT BEFORE YOU GO...Ron Paul’s Texas Straight Talk:
If $3.5 trillion is the true cost of these military adventures, $11,500 is the amount every man, woman and child in this country pays. So, a family of four would pay $46,000 just for this war. This is an especially painful number to me, as the median household income of my constituency in Texas is just $43,000 a year. In other words, war has cost more than an entire year’s worth of income from each middle class Texas family.
What about the impact of these costs on education, the very thing that so often helps to increase earnings? $46,000 would cover 90% of the tuition costs to attend a four year public university in Texas for both children in that family of four. Obviously, it would far outpace the cost of a community college degree, so vital to so many in the workforce.
But, instead of sending kids to college, too often we’re sending them to Iraq , where the best news in a long time is they aren’t killing our men and women as fast as they were last month.
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A new study shows that the cost of health insurance for many Americans rose sharply this year compared to previous years, exceeding average increases in workers' wages and giving employers even more hesitation about hiring new people. (more)
Newly published numbers from the Department of Health and Human Services show that American workers in 2010 paid average premiums of $4,940 for employer-provided health insurance to cover just themselves. (more)
How could the $720 million the U.S. is currently spending on the Iraq war each day be put to better use? Well, how about paying for the health care costs of 423,529 children? Or giving 34,904 college students four-year scholarships, or providing 6,482 families with homes?
This week Truthdig salutes Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes for uncovering the true cost of the war in Iraq. Last year Nobel Prize-winning economist Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Bilmes estimated the total price tag for Bush's misadventure in Mesopotamia at $2.267 trillion -- a tad higher than the $350 billion to $500 billion so often discussed.
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