The material and financial cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on America is astronomical. And that ignores the human cost.
Obama has just presented his 2012 Budget to Congress. Leaving to one side all the issues he faces with that, Chris Hellmann writing on TomDispatch analyses the figures and reveals that the US$676 sought for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is a drop in the ocean of what the real sum is - a truly staggering US$1.2 trillion.
"To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.
Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don’t forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a “miscellaneous” category -- a kind of department of chump change -- that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds."
Keep reading, here, to see where the money is to get to the US$1.2 trillion.
Obama has just presented his 2012 Budget to Congress. Leaving to one side all the issues he faces with that, Chris Hellmann writing on TomDispatch analyses the figures and reveals that the US$676 sought for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is a drop in the ocean of what the real sum is - a truly staggering US$1.2 trillion.
"To get closer to a real figure, it’s necessary to start peeking at other parts of the federal budget where so many other pots of security spending are squirreled away.
Missing from the Pentagon’s budget request, for example, is an additional $19.3 billion for nuclear-weapons-related activities like making sure our current stockpile of warheads will work as expected and cleaning up the waste created by seven decades of developing and producing them. That money, however, officially falls in the province of the Department of Energy. And then, don’t forget an additional $7.8 billion that the Pentagon lumps into a “miscellaneous” category -- a kind of department of chump change -- that is included in neither its base budget nor those war-fighting funds."
Keep reading, here, to see where the money is to get to the US$1.2 trillion.
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