Remember when President Bush’s chief economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, said back in 2003 that the Iraq war would cost from $100 billion to $200 billion? For that frank appraisal, he was fired.
The Bush team now estimates the cost of the Iraq war at about $500 billion.
But Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said this week that the actual costs to date have been about $3 trillion, according to his study — and the costs are certain to soar in coming years, with the need to rebuild the military and provide lifetime health care to veterans. The final price tag could be between $5 trillion and $7 trillion.
It’s a sobering reminder of the unforeseen costs of war.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration tried to shoot the messenger: “People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure,†said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.
It doesn’t look like courage — more like fiscal recklessness and managerial incompetence — to refuse to honestly face the soaring costs of this elective misadventure.
The rush to build a “virtual fence†along the U.S.-Mexico border has become a boondoggle. Big surprise. The Bush administration is having to scale back and scrap some its plans after its test phase of the project hasn’t worked as planned, the Washington Post reported. The Boeing Co. was paid $20.6 million for a 28-mile pilot project, but it has been beset with problems. Among them: Boeing used inappropriate software — which the government has paid Boeing an additional $65 million to replace — and rain and other environmental factors trigger the radar systems. As a result, we’re going to spend millions more on the project, and its first phase likely won’t be deployed until 2011 instead of 2008, as planned. But will it even work then?
Even the 27 percent of Americans who, according to a recent CBS News survey, approve of President Bush’s job performance should be concerned that millions of his administration’s e-mails are missing. The Presidential Records Act requires the White House to preserve its records, including e-mails. But testimony in a House hearing this week told of how, despite repeated warnings by technology experts and National Archives officials, the Bush administration installed a system for backing up e-mails that was “primitive†and had serious security flaws. Did it do so out of incompetence or to intentionally hide information? Unfortunately, that’s not an unreasonable question, given that former White House adviser Karl Rove and several other officials also used e-mail accounts at the Republican National Committee in an apparent attempt to circumvent record-keeping laws.
Kansans rather like seeing their governor in the national spotlight, judging from the first SurveyUSA poll since Gov. Kathleen Sebelius delivered the Democratic response to the State of the Union address, began campaigning for Barack Obama and was featured in Vogue. In the poll out Wednesday, co-sponsored by KWCH, Channel 12 in Wichita, 67 percent of those surveyed said they approved of the job Sebelius is doing, a rate 3 points higher than in mid-January. Interestingly, her approval ratings were the reverse in Wichita, dipping 3 points to 64 percent from mid-January to mid-February. But it’s been two years since Sebelius’ approval numbers statewide registered less than 60 percent in SurveyUSA polling. For purposes of comparison: New Mexico’s Bill Richardson, Iowa’s Chet Culver, California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger and Missouri’s Matt Blunt came in this month with 60, 48, 45 and 42 percent approval ratings, respectively.
It’s good that the FBI has launched an investigation into an altercation that left a Sedgwick County Jail inmate with a severely broken jaw and on life support. The incident occurred when Edgar Richard Jr., who reportedly is mentally ill, “started to get unruly and leave the cell†and a detention deputy attempted to stop him, according to a jail official. The severity of the injuries raises concerns about the amount of force used and whether the jail personnel are adequately prepared to handle inmates with mental health problems. The independent investigation should give the public confidence that the incident will be properly reviewed and any necessary action will be taken.
