Iraq War Costs US $12 Billion Per Month

George Bush has run up record deficits during his seven+ years in the White House, ignoring what used to be thought of as a core Republican value, controlled spending. John McCain has supported Mr. Bush in the most expensive of his boondoggles, Iraq. In a country where the water provided by Halliburton (and KBR) makes our soldiers ill (seems a bad way to spend money to me), where the outsourcing started by Cheney and Rumsfeld has led to record poor performance and incompetence in Iraq, well. . . it looks like the future budget deficits for Mr. McCain’s next 100 years of US presence in Iraq are going to be records as well. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The flow of blood may be ebbing, but the flood of money into the Iraq war is steadily rising, new analyses show.

In 2008, its sixth year, the war will cost approximately $12 billion a month, triple the “burn” rate of its earliest years, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz and coauthor Linda J. Bilmes write in a new book.

Beyond 2008, working with “best-case” and “realistic-moderate” scenarios, they project that the Iraq and Afghan wars, including long-term U.S. military occupations of those countries, will cost the U.S. budget between $1.7 trillion and $2.7 trillion - or more - by 2017.

Interest on money borrowed to pay those costs could add $816 billion to that bottom line, they say.