Too High A Cost

By Keith Boykin, in politics
Tuesday, September 9 2003, 2:07AM

Now that we're in Iraq, just about everyone agrees we can't just get up and leave. But $87 billion is too high a cost to pay. The amount the president proposes to spend on the war that "ended" in May is more than the entire annual defense budgets of Russia, China, Japan, Britain, France or Germany. That's outrageous.

George Bush's failed leadership has never been more clearly demonstrated than it was on Sunday when he pleaded for more money and more troops for the war on terror. What's worse is that the president had already gotten $79 billion for the war back in April. The president's intransigence created the problem, but now he needs the American taxpayers and the international community to bail him out.

Long before the president's request, the U.S. was already outspending the rest of the world on defense. The president's FY 2004 budget calls for nearly $400 billion on defense spending, and that's before the $87 billion is added into the pot.

Taken by itself, the $400 billion defense budget is three times the amount that Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Syrian, Sudan, Cuba and North Korea combined spend on their annual defense, according to the Center for Defense Information.

Yes, that's right. We spend not once, not twice, but three times as much on defense as all our potential adversaries combined. As the world's only remaining superpower, that number may not seem outrageous. But to add $87 billion on top of it and to insist on more revenue-draining tax cuts when the U.S. is already facing a record breaking $500 billion deficit is the height of fiscal irresponsibility.

If a CEO of any reputable company wanted to increase spending and reduce revenue in the midst of a major financial crisis, the board of directors would surely ask for his resignation. As the people are the directors of the U.S. government, we should expect no less from our leadership.

So how much money are we talking about? Washington legend suggests that Senator Everett Dirksen once said, "A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money" He had a point. When we deal with budgets in the trillions of dollars and deficits in the hundreds of billions, it's hard to figure out what those numbers mean.

Here's how the $87 billion stacks up against other priorities in the budget. The White House budget calls for $55 billion on education, $49 billion on health, $30 billion on housing, $24 billion on science and space, $22 billion on transportation and $4 billion on energy. That means we will spend more on the war than we do on education and housing combined.

The $87 billion is also twice the budget of the entire Department of Homeland Security. "Bush hopes to spend more in Iraq and Afghanistan than all 50 states say they need -- $78 billion -- to finance the budget shortfalls they anticipate for 2004," the Washington Post reported today.

Do the math. The president wants to spend more on the war next year than the entire U.S. government will spend on housing, science, space, transportation and energy combined. And despite all the conservative criticism of "excessive" welfare spending, the U.S. will spend more than five times as much on the war effort as we do each year on welfare ($16 billion). That's why critics of the war asked how much it would cost before the conflict began in March.

Here's what else we could do with $87 billion. We could guarantee that every American has health insurance. The president's new budget request is almost exactly the cost of Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's health insurance proposal ($88.3 billion). Ironically, the same politicians who said we could not afford universal health care seem to think we can afford the war in Iraq.

We live in the richest country in the world and yet 40 million Americans do not have health insurance. How can we afford to spend billions of dollars to take care of another country and we can't find the money to take care of our own people in this country?

So let's get this straight. These are the numbers:

$88 billion (the cost of universal health insurance)
$87 billion (the cost of the president's new war proposal)
$65 billion (the entire Russian defense budget)
$55 billion (annual federal education spending)
$49 billion (annual federal health care spending)
$47 billion (the entire Chinese defense budget)
$38 billion (the entire British defense budget)
$30 billion (annual federal housing spending)
$24 billion (annual federal science and space spending)
$22 billion (annual federal transportation spending)
$16 billion (annual federal welfare spending)
$4 billion (annual federal energy spending)
$1.4 billion (the entire Iraq defense budget before the war)

Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh revealed the hypocrisy of their beliefs this week when they rushed to defend the $87 billion request. These were the same conservatives who complained that government was too big and too costly in the Clinton administration when the government ran four successive surpluses.

We should have known this was coming when the war began in March. Back then, the White House tried to distract us from thinking about the time commitment and the costs involved in the war. But it took us 25 years to get out of Vietnam. Forty years after the Korean War, we still have troops there. So what made the White House think we could have gotten in and out of Iraq in a matter of months?

No matter how you look at it, the price tag for this war is too high and George Bush is to blame for it. If we had built international support for the war, the U.S. cost would be much smaller. The U.S. paid only $9 billion out of the $80 billion cost of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Unfortunately for Bush, the president's budget request is just another nail in the coffin of his legacy. If Bush knew the war would cost this much and didn't tell us, he lied (again). If he didn't know how much it would cost, he didn't think through the war plan very carefully. So take your pick. Either he's a liar or an idiot. Either way we're screwed.

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