A TRILLION HERE, A TRILLION THERE

Malcom Lagauche

I rarely write about detailed economics because I am neither a mathematician nor an economist. But, recent news items have prompted me to take a shot at writing about money. A few days ago, a report emerged that stated the U.S. would spend almost four trillion dollars on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by the year 2017. Estimates on the amount spent already in the Iraq conflict have surpassed the trillion-dollar mark. How much is a trillion dollars? I will use the American standard for discussing the following. The British use different figures for what a billion represents, so I want to clarify the system I am using. A million dollars is still the benchmark for a wealthy person in the West. Take a thousand million and you have a billion. Then, take a thousand billion and you have a trillion. That is a one with 12 zeros following: $1,000,000,000,000. That’s a helluva lot of money. Let’s go back to the pre-liberated Iraq days preceding March 2003. Paul Wolfowitz told the people of the U.S. that the invasion of Iraq would not cost the U.S. taxpayer one penny. He predicted that any conflict would be short-lived and whatever the U.S. would fork over for the cost, somewhere in the vicinity of $20 billion, would soon be replaced by the selling of Iraqi oil to pay back the U.S. for the favor of bringing democracy to Iraq. Such a deal....

continua / continued