The list of questions surrounding the war with Iran is staggeringly long, but one of the nagging lines of inquiry involves its price tag. What exactly is this war of choice costing American taxpayers?
Roughly a week after President Donald Trump launched combat operations, congressional sources said the war was costing the United States an estimated $1 billion a day. A week later, a congressional source told MS NOW that the administration, during a private briefing for lawmakers, revised that number to $1.6 billion a day.
In the days that followed, the White House decided it no longer wanted to talk about the financial costs and refused to offer even vague answers. By late April, Jules Hurst III, the Defense Department’s chief financial officer, said the war had reached “about $25 billion” — a figure that most considered unrealistically low, even at the time.
Nearly five months later, the public has a new number to consider. MS NOW reported:
As hostilities in Iran continue, the Congressional Budget Office has a new cost estimate for the war thus far: $38 billion.
In addition to the $38 billion already spent, the CBO report published Tuesday estimates the war will cost an additional $2 billion to $3 billion per month beginning August 1 — and it could increase with more direct hostilities, such as exchanges of fire or damage to military bases.
It’s worth emphasizing that the total is an estimate, in large part because the Pentagon refused to provide the Congressional Budget Office with any information. (White House hype notwithstanding, this is not the most transparent administration in history.)
Nevertheless, the $38 billion topline result in the CBO’s findings is the bad news. The worse news is that the tally doesn’t include all kinds of other costs.
“CBO’s estimate does not include costs borne by other parts of the federal government, such as the increased cost of fuel used by the Postal Service,” the report added. “Nor does it include costs already accounted for in the federal budget, such as the basic operating costs of the military forces involved in the conflict.”
The price tag also doesn’t include the costs associated with repairing U.S. military bases hit by Iranian strikes, the cost of replacing munitions stockpiles, the economic costs imposed on the American public or the interest on the national debt.
The $38 billion figure, in other words, should be seen as a minimum. The overall price tag is considerably higher — and climbing.
Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania, the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, requested the CBO score, and he wasted little time in reacting to its findings.
“Donald Trump’s disastrous war in Iran has already taken the lives of brave American servicemembers and left others wounded. Beyond that human toll, this nonpartisan CBO report makes clear that the war has also cost American taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and counting, while continuing to drive up costs,” the congressman said in a written statement. “Donald Trump and Republicans have spent years telling Americans that we cannot afford to help families here at home, but apparently they can find tens of billions of dollars, and potentially much more, for a reckless war that is leaving Americans to pay the price.”
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
The post Why the new price tag for the war with Iran only tells part of an awful story appeared first on MS NOW.
