The longest war in United States history is costing taxpayers a lot money since it first began more than a decade ago. The War in Afghanistan has come with a price-tag of $1 trillion, which is in addition to the Iraq War’s total sum of $1.7 trillion.
Both are immense sums for a nation that suffers from a national debt of $18 trillion and $120 trillion in unfunded liabilities and expenditures.
According to the report written by Ryan Edwards at City University of New York, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were financed through borrowing. Of this enormous war debt, the federal government has paid more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in interest costs.
Approximately 80 percent of this spending on the Afghan war has been under the Obama administration, which actually increased the number of troops in the country soon after entering the White House back in 2009.
Financial experts say that the final cost of the Afghan war will likely be hundreds of billions of dollars more than the current amount. This is likely to happen because the Pentagon is asking for $120 billion for operations in Afghanistan from 2016 to 2019 and once these soldiers return home and reach their 60s they will seek healthcare and use expensive medical devices.
The unfunded pension fund liability for the Pentagon is projected to soar from $1.27 trillion today to more than $2.7 trillion in 2013.
In fact, spending for this 13-year conflict and its reconstruction will actually be more than the Marshall Plan to help rebuild Western Europe.
“Time and again, I am running into people from USAID, State and the Pentagon who think they are in Kansas [not Afghanistan],” said John Sopko, the government’s special inspector-general for Afghanistan. “My auditors tell me things [about spending plans] and I say, ‘you have to be making this up, this is Alice in Wonderland.'”
An administration official told CNBC that the dirtiest secret about this war is that nobody knows, – or nobody will tell the American people – how much this war has actually cost the country.
It is arbitrary to say that the war is ‘funded by borrowing’ because there is only one bucket. The Federal Government spends 3.6 Trillion out of the bucket every year and collects approx 3 Trillion into it. It borrows the difference. Period. Any fancy footwork in an attempt to correlate specific spending with specific revenue is an artificial gambit, aka ‘spin.’
Second, a total cost of 1000 Billion over 13 years comes to $76 Billion per year. The budget for the military is around $600 Billion per year. So, relatively: it is not the horrific catastrophe painted in this essay.
Third, all government-run “pensions” are unfunded. That is the raw reality of Keynesianism and the ProgressiveProject.
There may only be one bucket of revenue but one thing is certain after bailing out (too big to fail BANKS) the Fed spending trillions more buying up Wall Streets Junk Assets, and combined that with the military funding of trillions more. The only place Obama certainly hasn’t spent money on the middle class taxpayers and rebuilding the American Infrastructure.
“military funding of trillions more” where do you get that? The budget and actual for the last few years is less than $1Trillion/year. It’s around $650 billion/yr.