This past weekend I caught Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz on BookTV. They are co-authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict and their presentation was very interesting, if more than a bit depressing. During the first half or so they gave their figures and explained how they arrived at them. Blimes told a story behind one statistic which I want to relate here.
In trying to calculate the cost of caring for veterans, she set out to determine the number of soldiers who were wounded in Iraq. Along the way she discovered a peculiarity in the way the Department of Defense lists deaths and the number of wounded. Going by info on the DoD webpage available to the public, she found that the total number of deaths was a "genuine" total. That is, if a soldier lost his or her life in the country, they were put in the death column. But as Blimes found out, the wounded are a different matter. If a soldier is wounded in combat, his or her death goes into one tally while being wounded outside of combat puts you into another one. Using numbers obtained from the DoD website which, again, is publicly accessible, she summed both wounded counts.
Blimes tells us that, a short time later, she received a call from the Undersecretary of Defense or some such figure who demanded to know how she obtained her statistics on wounded soldiers. She explained that the figures were obtained from the DoD website. The gentleman on the other end of the phone demanded that she fax a copy of the webpage to her. When Blimes offered to e-mail the URL, she was rebuked and told that his e-mail address is classified. So she printed out the relevant webpages and faxed them to him. It wasn't long before the DoD website was retooled so that the data that Blimes had so easily obtained was dispersed. She explained that it was all there but it was much more difficult to get to as more webpages had to be parsed.
This tale was both funny and sad. Sad that the DoD was deliberately obfuscating the depth of the tragedy of the war in Iraq and funny that a DoD official can't be bothered to look at his own organization's webpage or find an underling to do so.
Part of their presentation dealt with how the war affects the economy. It was noted that money spent on the war isn't spent on infrastructure or education and that this is the first war to be paid for almost exclusively by borrowing money from foreign countries. Spiglitz also talked about how Americans are deeply in debt, having borrowed money from the equity in their homes, and are generally not saving. (Savings rates are at their lowest since The Great Depression.) This reminded me of a cover story in a recent issue of In These Times called "Killer Credit" in which I learned that "Americans own almost 700 million credit cards and hold $915 billion in consumer debt, with the average borrower owing more than $9,000".
I have one credit card which I'm trying to pay off as soon as I can. My resolution for 2008 was to rid myself of debt. Not all of it, but I resolved to pay off my credit card and my car loan by the summer with my Visa being the first as it has the highest interest rate. I've been plugging away at it the past two and a half months and have gotten it down to the size where I can drown it in the bathtub, to borrow a phrase. In fact, I hope to be able to drown it today after a quick trip to my credit union.
When that rebate check from the Feds comes, it will be used to finish paying off my car or will be tucked away. How about you? Are you going to cash the check and go on an economically stimulating buying spree?
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