Over 25 percent of the homeless in America are veterans.
Over 600 American veterans are committing suicide each month.
Americans have lost their 4th amendment rights.
America has lost the respect of nearly every country in the world.
The dollar drops in value daily, as our debt rises.

Costs of war?
Dollars?

"Partisan"

I love it, the administration has no trouble criticizing the Democrats for being "partisan" by coming up with their own estimates for the Iraq War.

Nothing like the "non-partisan" administration. You know the one that doesn't add the cost of the Iraq War into their budget. The one that then claims the budget is nearly balanced while they borrow billions/trillions for the war that "isn't on the budget books".

Well, please enlighten us Mr. Nussle: What, specifically, and in detail, is wrong with the projection?

1.6 trillion, 1 trillion, what's the difference?
It's still a total waste of life and treasure.

Thanks W.....not!

The Radical Republican Guard ( you know the repugnant, repulsive, repuritinizing, zealot, war mongering supporters of greed and deceit) want to stick to the if i say it's so it's so philosophy that has worked on Americans for 7 years. No more W, get Out !

" The full costs of this war to our enonomy.... have never been accounted for by this administration."
Direct costs of plus six hundred billion so far.
What are the legacy costs of more than a million veterans.
Why did none of the critics of the Democrats estimate give us their estimates including veterans cost.
It must be a scary number if the Republicans are afraid to mention it.

My calculations of the total benefit to Americans is $4,793,568,829,142,531.49 over 35 years, based on various assumptions. Now prove me wrong.

"They tried to manufacture bad news on their own," Nussle said during a breakfast meeting with reporters.

"They" didn't have to manufacture bad news with regard to our war in Iraq. The news and numbers speak for themselves. The Bush "partisans" are in total denial.

Bruce says Nussle is an unhinged, right-wing, Republican moonbat, and therefore his opinion carries no weight.

"BUSH SPEAKS THROUGH OMB"

MO MONEY, MO MONEY, MO MONEY. BECAUSE THIS IS WHY THEY CALL ME BIG POPPY, 1.4 TRILLION DOLLARS BIG POPPY MR. OMB.
YOU BETTER RECOGNIZE!

RATION CARD FOR YOU, RATION CARD FOR ME, RATION CARD FOR YOU RATION CARD FOR ME, RATION CARD FOR YOU TWO RATION CARDS FOR ME, OH YOU HAVE CHILDREN. RATION CARD FOR YOU, FOUR RATION CARDS FOR ME.

NOW THAT'S AN ECONOMY!

Let's see....key points:

"projected" +

"Joint Economic Committee" but the report was prepared ONLY by democratic members. +

Refuted by the OMB +

Harry Reid's comments =

An irrelevant report with unsubstantiated data and a waste of space in my newspaper. Better luck next time guys. I am sure the "Demophiles" will love it tho.

Jim Nussle and Dana Perrino are right this is typical liberal Democrat spin. Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and our own Dickie Durbin don't want money going to the military. They want communist social programs and sneakily add pork barrel projects to all military bills. Tax and spenders all. How can they live with themselves they have no conscience and they support abortion on demand killing babies in the womb whenever they can. Jerry White, Springfield, IL

Good idea. Let's attach interest and side effects on every piece of the federal budget. Instead of spending $600 billion on the "war on poverty" each year, we're spending 1.6 trillion.

TMB-
It works the other way on social programs. It's cheaper for society to help people become healthy, productive individuals than have then end up in emergency rooms or prisons later. Same principle with environmental controls. It's much cheaper to prevent it then pass the cost along to society later.

Jerry White (Journalist?), please check into the V.A. and have them remove the shrapnel from your brain, you're scaring the kids.

Sgt. Bolen--from Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize for economics (I GUARANTEE HE KNOWS WAY MORE ON THE SUBJECT THAN YOU DO), to use your own words:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12855294/national_affairs_the_2_trillion_dollar_war

BTW, ask the OMB if they ever found the $9 billion in cash that fell off the truck in Iraq

Oh, and Emerson (Rambo) Bolen, I caught the trailer on your new movie, dude. What was it you said..."When you're pushed...Killing's as easy as breathing." Awesome!
You should pat yourself on the back for that one.

dt,

Nice spin, and theories. The opposing point of view about the productivity of the welfare system might be that poverty was declining until the 1960’s when the “war on poverty” started. Since then, we’ve spent 11 trillion, poverty has stagnated, the prisons are jammed, and people are rewarded for not being productive.

Sure there should be some environmental controls. That’s why Teddy Roosevelt established the National Park Service, Nixon established the EPA & The Clean Air Act, and most recently, George W Bush established the Northwest Hawaiian Islands National Marine Reserve (larger than all our national parks combined).

Pro-war advocates could “theorize” that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (supported by both parties) saved us cash by dismantling Al-Qaeda, preventing attacks in the U.S. and elsewhere. Getting rid of Saddam now prevented the cost of containing him and getting rid of him in the future. None of that can be proven, however.

We could debate all day about those topics, but it really doesn’t matter. The point is that if you are going to add compound interest and theorized side effects as “true cost”, you need to do it for all aspects of government spending.

The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could total $2.4 trillion through the next decade, or nearly $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country, according to a Congressional Budget Office estimate scheduled released On September 10, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a press conference to disclose that over $2,000,000,000,000 in Pentagon funds could not be accounted for. Rumsfeld stated: "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions." Why doesn’t the Republican controlled government start an investigation into the unaccounted for $2.3 that in missing? " Does the American People not care where this money went? Osama bin Laden boasted that the invasion of Iraq has bogged down the United States in a hopeless war that advances al Qaeda's recruitment goals and bin Laden's aim of bankrupting the U.S. economy, according to a translation of the full text of the terrorist leader's remarks on a videotape that surfaced several years ago. The Saudi millionaire brags that he is succeeding beyond his dreams in destabilizing the U.S. economy and bankrupting the U.S. government, asserting that President Bush is easily manipulated into taking military and security steps that harm American interests. He added: "We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." He noted remarks by counterterrorism experts that al Qaeda's expenses in attacking America are a tiny fraction of the cost of Washington's counterterrorism efforts. "Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million [U.S.] dollars, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As an avid independent I would like to point out that the so called good news coming out of Iraq has a lot to do with the "fact" (sorry no citation) that Iraq has largely segregated itself along all lines (sectarian etc.)