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WHAT:  Digging Deeper XLIV: The Three Trillion Dollar War
WHO:  Led by Mark Jensen
WHEN:  Monday, March 31, 2008 -- 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m.
WHERE:  Mandolin Café, 3923 South 12th St., Tacoma, WA 98405

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United for Peace
of Pierce County (WA)
Study Circle:
March 31, 2008
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DIGGING DEEPER XLIV: THE THREE TRILLION DOLLAR WAR

On Dec. 31, 2002, the New York Times reported that the director of the OMB said the Iraq war would cost “in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion.” In The Three Trillion Dollar War, published on March 3, one of the world’s most prominent economists and a Harvard expert in government finance arrive at $3 trillion as a conservative estimate of the true cost of a war that was called “the greatest strategic disaster in our history” by Lt. Gen. (ret.) William E. Odom, former director of the National Security Agency, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Jan. 18, 2007.

(Note for the mathematically challenged: A million seconds is 13 days. Three trillion seconds is 95,064 years.)

Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, is one of the ten most often cited economists in the world. Now on the faculty of Columbia University, he is former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and former chief economist of the World Bank, an institution he criticized in Globalization and Its Discontents (2002). Linda Bilmes has been assistant secretary of state and chief financial officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

—Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, The Three Trilliion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict (W.W. Norton, 2008).  —  "Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. This sobering study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes casts a spotlight on expense items that have been hidden from the U.S. taxpayer, including not only big-ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans -- for the rest of their lives . Shifting to a global focus, the authors investigate the cost in lives and economic damage within Iraq and the region. Finally, with the chilling precision of an actuary, the authors measure what the U.S. taxpayer's money would have produced if instead it had been invested in the further growth of the U.S. economy. Written in language as simple as the details are disturbing, this book will forever change the way we think about the war." --Book description.

MEETING SCHEDULE -- Mondays from 7:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at the Mandolin Café, 3923 S. 12th St., Tacoma, WA.

No charge for participation. Some copies available for purchase or loan. Contact: Mark Jensen (jensenmk@plu.edu; 253-756-7519).

Regular meetings of United for Peace of Pierce County are held at 6:30 p.m. on 1st Thursdays and at 7:00 p.m. on 3rd Thursdays at First Congregational Church, 209 S. “J” St., Tacoma, WA.

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United for Peace
of Pierce County (WA)
Study Circle:
March 31, 2008
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