9-02-06, 8:48 am

This Labor Day marks the third year that thousands of working Americans have left their families and their jobs to fight in a war that the Bush administration will not bring to a close.

As always, labor has borne the brunt of the war. The vast majority of the 2,600 dead and 20,000 wounded are young men and women pulled off the factory and shop floors and told that they should defend their country from a threat that proved to be nonexistent.

More than half of those killed were under the age of 24. Many enlisted because the policies of the Bush administration destroyed their chances for a college education or a viable economic future. The armed services seemed like a way out of a life where the minimum wage remains at $5.15 an hour and unemployment is rampant for young men without a college degree.

In addition to the senseless loss of life, federal spending for the Iraq war has pulled thousands of dollars out of the pockets of every American worker.

A new study from the nonpartisan National Priorities Project has calculated the cost of the Iraq war at $1,075 for every American or $2,844 for every household. The calculations are based on a Congressional Research Service June 2006 report, which put the total cost of the war at $318.5 billion.

The money for the war is being spent at a rate $10 million per hour and $244 million per day, according to NPP.

The NPP study also breaks down the cost by state by cross-referencing the amount of federal tax revenues collected there. California, the most populous state, has contributed more than $40 billion. New York has contributed $28 billion.

The latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office give a mid-range scenario of an additional cost of $266 billion for the war over the next decade, putting the total at more than $500 billion.

But these official analyses of the cost of the Iraq War focus only on direct cash spending by the federal government since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, an amount that represents only the tip of the iceberg.

Another study puts the cost closer to $1 trillion. Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University, a Nobel prize-winning economist, and Linda Bilmes, a budget expert at Harvard University, published a detailed analysis of the full costs of the war earlier this year.

The Stiglitz study includes current cash spending plus the cost of replacing military equipment and munitions consumed, the ongoing cost of medical treatment for returning veterans, disability payments to veterans over their lifetimes, higher recruiting costs and recruitment bonuses, and the cost of interest on the money that the federal government has borrowed to finance the war.

With these costs included, the Stiglitz study puts the direct cash cost of the war at $750 billion to $1.2 trillion. This amount is based on the assumption that the Bush administration will begin to withdraw troops in 2006 and continue to decrease military operations over the next five years, an optimistic view.

The study notes that including these costs still do not provide a total picture of the real economic impact of the war.

It reports that official accounts of the cost disguise the real economic impact. For example, the military quantifies the value of each lost life as the amount it pays in death benefits and life insurance payments to survivors. To boost recruitment, the death benefit was recently increased from $12,240 to $100,000, and the life insurance benefit was increased from $250,00 to $500,000.

The military does not include loss of the income that each soldier would have earned or other contributions that the soldier would have made to the economy and society.

The military also calculates the cost of the 20,000 soldiers wounded in the war by their medical treatment expenses and current disability pay, not the expected future payments that must be made or the loss of income that the soldier might have earned.

The Stiglitz study also notes that the official accounts of the costs of the war do not include recruiting costs, which have increased dramatically, or the loss of wages for the thousands of Reservists called up.

The Stiglitz study reminds us that before the war began, Larry Lindsey, Bush’s economic advisor, estimated that the cost of the war might be as much as $200 billion, which the White House called a gross overestimation. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz claimed that Iraq could finance its own reconstruction, and the Bush administration announced that the war would be short, with few casualties.

  From Labor Research Association