D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
May 2008
Editors Note
Page: 2Even public safety would be hurt. The president's budget would trim grants to juvenile justice programs, the COPS community policing program, prevention of violence against women, assistance for areas with high drug trafficking, and even grants for homeland security. (So much for fighting terrorism — funding, such as support for first responders, would be cut by 45 percent.)
So where is all the money going? If 5,000 poor kids in New Mexico are being discouraged from signing up for Medicaid, are we at least getting tax cuts so capitalism can work its wonders and somehow fix these woes?
If you've been paying attention at all — and, sadly, many Americans have simply tuned out to the unpleasant reality — you already know the answer. Uncle Sam is still spending plenty and racking up huge budget deficits. But the money isn't going to poor children or the elderly in New Mexico. It's going to Iraq.
No, this isn't going to be yet another editorial rant about the folly of our Iraq policy or the elusiveness of the supposed benefits of the "surge." This is simply a lesson in dollars and cents. As taxpayers and voters, we have (perhaps unwittingly) chosen our priorities. Federal funding for medical care, foster children, hungry people, job training and police protection, among other things, apparently is not a high priority. Fighting "Al Qaeda" in Iraq (where Al Qaeda did not exist until the US blundered in) is evidently more important.
Americans may not realize exactly how big an investment they're making in Iraq, however, as opposed to, say, investing in immunizing children in Deming. The Bush administration has done its best to obfuscate the true costs of the Iraq conflict. That's probably a savvy political move — because the numbers are staggering.
Current spending alone in Iraq adds up to $411 million every day. No, that's not a typo — every day. Put another way, our ever-mounting Iraq tab comes to about $5,000 every second.
In the time it took you to read that last paragraph, we spent $50,000 in Iraq.
But that's just the short-term cost. As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff notes, "The cost estimates are squishy and controversial, partly because the $12.5 billion a month that we're now paying for Iraq is only a down payment. We'll still be making disability payments to Iraq war veterans 50 years from now."
So Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calculates that the total Iraq bill, including such long-term costs, actually amounts to $25 billion a month. That's a little over $80 a month for every New Mexico man, woman and child.
Ultimately, Stiglitz pegs the grand total cost of the Iraq war at $3 trillion, or about $10,000 per American. As Kristoff says, "I don't feel that I'm getting my money's worth." Do you?
But go back to the question of priorities. A Congressional study concluded that the funds spent on the Iraq war in a single day could pay for:
- Head Start for 58,000 children
- Pell Grants for 153,000 students to attend college
- 11,000 Border Patrol agents, or
- 9,000 police officers.
The $26 million under-funding of New Mexico's Medicaid program could be made up in about an hour and a half of current Iraq spending, not even counting the longer-term costs calculated by Stiglitz. Instead, we choose to fund another 90 minutes of fighting.
Apparently, that's a trade-off Americans are willing to make. Don't try to argue that, as a society, we care about the poor, the elderly, the hungry or the disadvantaged. Our supposed compassion for abandoned children and abused women and seniors too ill to leave their homes to get medical care turns out — at least considered collectively, discounting individual acts of kindness and charity — to be all talk. Hot air. Mere words.
Put your money where your mouth is, folks.
That visiting space alien, perhaps reading the local papers while coming in for another landing in Roswell, could draw only one impartial conclusion about the American character in this first decade of the 21st century.
I don't think it's a judgment we'd be proud of.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.