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The Three Trillion Dollor War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict is Nobel Prize-winning, globally-thinking Columbia prof Joseph Stiglitz’s new book. The book posits that Bush’s cost estimates for the war in Iraq were incorrect—the administration cited a $200 billion figure—and that the Iraq conflict will cost almost double that of WWI, putting the figure at just about three trillion dollars. Ergo, attention-grabbing book title.
But the thing is, taxes (particularly for the rich) haven’t really risen—in fact, they’ve been lowered in some cases. And Stiglitz argues that deficit spending makes not raising taxes possible. In fact, he’ll be testifying in front of the Senate on Thursday saying so.
So… Columbia in the news. And by “the news”, of course, we mean probably MSNBC.
– JNW
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@Stiglitz So, in summary, a Nobel-prize winning economist seems to be ignorant of the concept of currency inflation, or at least to profess ignorance. Impressive.
@Huh What am I missing here? Inflation? How? Unless $200B has inflated to $3000B since 2003 (and I think we might have noticed that), what does this have to do with inflation?
@Armin Rosen Stilitz and Michael Massing (who’s written some excellent articles about the Iraq War for NYRB) are speaking on this tomorrow at 8:30 the IAB.