April 9, 2003

THE WAR IN Iraq carries huge moral, environmental, and human costs – devastating Iraq's infrastructure and claiming many thousands of lives. But its economic costs are also staggering and difficult to contain, predict, or understand.

President George W. Bush has asked Congress for $75 billion to fight the war, and that appears to be the bare minimum the invasion will cost. The Senate has already set aside $100 billion, a price tag that doesn't include rebuilding and extended-occupation costs.

Expert testimony during Senate hearings before the war began placed reconstruction costs in Iraq at $50 billion to $150 billion. The politically moderate group Taxpayers for Common Sense placed the total for rebuilding at $170 billion to $550 billion over 10 years.

A more comprehensive and credible estimate of this conflict's costs comes from Yale University economics professor William Nordhaus, who literally wrote the book on The Economic Consequences of War with Iraq. Taking into account both direct costs and impacts to the U.S. economy through oil prices and other macroeconomic factors, he priced the invasion at $121 billion "for a short war favorable to the U.S." or $1.6 trillion "for a protracted war, unfavorable to the U.S.," which could include one that the United States still wins.

What does all of this mean? $100 billion, $500 billion, $1.6 trillion – it's a whirl of numbers too huge for most of us to even comprehend or contextualize. So we're going to give you a little frame of reference. The following are some of the things – at some of the possible estimate levels – we could buy or do if we weren't at war in Iraq:

$100 billion

• Pay off the current budget deficits facing each of the 50 states, thereby preventing tax increases and cutbacks in spending on education and social services (source: National Governors Association)

• Create a fund to pay for every California child under the age of 18 (9.25 million people) to attend college at a UC campus for four years (sources: U.S. Census, University of California)

• Buy five years' worth of birth control pills for every American woman of child-bearing age (source: www.covermypill.org)

• Cut a check for $375 to every resident of the United States

• Quadruple what the federal government spends on K-12 education (source: National Priorities Project)

• Provide health care to all uninsured children in the United States for the next five years (source: ibid)

• Buy all of the power plants and electrical transmission lines in California to create a statewide public power agency – and still have $58 billion left over to put toward upgrades and lower consumer rates (source: Independent Energy Producers)

• Save almost all of the rain forests in Latin America and the Caribbean (834 million acres, or roughly one-fourth of the world's forest cover) through the Nature Conservancy's Adopt an Acre Program, at $75 an acre (source: Nature Conservancy)

• Buy an order of steak fajitas for every cop in the country every day for the next 10 years ... and still have $90 billion left over to settle civil lawsuits (sources: Blue Light Cafe, Department of Justice)

$200 billion

• Pay for effective worldwide treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS through the year 2018, which is more than 13 times what the U.S. government has offered so far (source: Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS)

$300 billion

• Close what was projected to be the federal budget deficit over the next two years (a projection that does not include the cost of the war in Iraq) (source: Congressional Budget Office)

• Double the gross national income of the people of Syria, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, and Pakistan (source: World Bank)

$422 billion

• Pay off the national debts of the 47 poorest countries in the world (source: WorldWatch Institute)

• Cover the amount spent on agricultural subsidies every 16 months by the United States, Canada, western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan (source: ibid)

• Cover the annual defense budgets of those same countries (source: ibid)

• Pay for two years worth of debt service on the U.S. national debt (source: ibid)

$1.3 trillion

• Build a modest, affordable home ($46,600 for 1,050 square feet) for 2.2 million of the country's estimated 3.5 million homeless people (sources: Urban Institute, Habitat for Humanity)

• Create a wide variety of social programs with funding levels equal to the combined 2002 revenues of the top 10 Fortune 500 companies (source: Fortune magazine)

$1.6 trillion

• Cover almost half of the projected shortfall in what the federal government needs to make all scheduled Social Security payments for the next 75 years (source: Social Security Administration)

• Pay for President Bush's ambitious plan to cut taxes over the next 10 years (source: White House)

• Decrease the U.S. national debt by 25 percent (source: U.S. National Debt Clock)

• Cut a check for $5,500 to every resident of the United States

Steven T. Jones