The San Francisco Chronicle
Your tax dollars at work: According to the Pentagon, each of the hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles dropped on Baghdad so far cost $1 million.
Each bomber run over the Iraqi capital cost up to $15,000 an hour.
Each aircraft carrier group deployed in and around the Persian Gulf carries a price tag of $3 million a day.
And each “meal ready to eat” consumed by U.S. forces runs $6.77 — a daily cost of more than $3 million to feed 250,000 soldiers.
Of course, backers of the war in Iraq will argue that any expense is justifiable when the goal is to topple a ruthless dictator and liberate an oppressed people. And my goal here isn’t to quibble with that.
I just want to take a deep breath and focus for a moment on the harsh reality that war isn’t cheap.
“The money for the war will ultimately have to come from somewhere,” said Doug Heller, a spokesman for the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights in Southern California. “I don’t see how you can pay for both cruise missiles and huge tax cuts.”
On Friday, as the military unleashed its “shock and awe” campaign on the people of Baghdad, the U.S. Senate voted to slice $100 billion from President Bush‘s $726 billion tax-cut plan. The money would go to a reserve fund that would help pay the war’s expenses.
But is $100 billion enough? At this point, no one can say.
For its part, the Congressional Budget Office estimated in September that it would cost about $14 billion to get all the troops and equipment into the Gulf and that the first month of combat would run the United States about $10 billion.
The budget office saw the war costing about $8 billion a month after that, and then at least another $9 billion to get all our soldiers and gear back home.
No stab was made at how much it would cost to rebuild Iraq after all the damage gets done. A researcher at Yale University, however, put the price of reconstruction and nation building at more than $100 billion.
We do know this: The Bush administration is forecasting a record budget deficit this year of $304 billion, rising to $307 billion in 2004. Neither figure includes the cost of the war in Iraq.
In the first five months of this fiscal year alone, the federal government spent $194 billion in cash that it didn’t have, or three times the shortfall for the same period a year earlier.
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, February’s deficit was the largest monthly shortfall on record: $96.3 billion.
Meanwhile, individual income-tax payments for the first five months of the fiscal year were down more than 11 percent from a year earlier, to $331.5 billion. Corporate tax payments were cut almost in half, to $33 billion.
Not to belabor the point, but there are some who wonder if this is the most prudent moment for Bush to press ahead with more than $1 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years.
The president, of course, feels that it is.
“As we engage in action to ensure freedom and security, it is imperative that we stay focused on important domestic priorities, including creating jobs and strengthening economic growth at home,” he said the other day, urging members of Congress to leave his tax-cut plan alone.
But it’s hard for others to see how tax cuts and runaway deficits will help America’s economy over the long haul, especially as our commitments abroad look increasingly open-ended.
“This is so far away from what we should be doing right now, it’s hard to imagine what the impact will be,” said Alan Auerbach, an economics professor at UC Berkeley. “It seems highly irresponsible.”
Then there are all the wild cards that could play havoc with the economy — cutbacks in travel and consumer spending, volatile fuel costs, uncertain financial markets.
With U.S. troops fighting overseas, this is clearly not the time to insist that the Bush administration provide a financial accounting for its actions.
But America’s meter is running, and the fare will have to be paid sooner or later. If not by us, then by our children. There’s no other way to look at this.
