‘I am certain’: Harvard policy expert warns the true cost of the Iran war to U.S. taxpayers will exceed $1 trillion

Following the 2003 Iraq war, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected the U.S. had spent $500 billion in direct costs on the conflict, but economics and policy experts Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes begged to differ. In a 2006 study, they calculated the war was in fact four times as expensive as what the CBO had calculated, costing U.S. taxpayers more than $2 trillion in their moderate estimate. In 2013, Bilmes revised the costs and concluded about $4 trillion to $6 trillion was spent on both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

The U.S. is once again locked in conflict in the Middle East, and Bilmes, a Harvard Kennedy School public policy lecturer and author of “The Ghost Budget: U.S. War Spending and Fiscal Transparency,” is once again sounding the alarm on the true cost of war. 

“I am certain we will spend $1 trillion for the Iran war,” she said in an interview this month at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Perhaps we have already racked up that amount.”

Bilmes’s 13-figure estimation dwarfs initial projections of spending on the conflict, at $1 billion per day. The Pentagon told Congress the first week of the war reportedly cost about $11.3 billion alone. If that rate of spending continued, the cost of the war would have exceeded $35 billion by April 1, according to think tank American Enterprise Institute. AEI economists suggested that the first month of war cost each American household $260—which seems small, but there are over 150 million taxpaying households in the United States. Currently, Bilmes estimates the U.S. is spending about $2 billion per day on the war.

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday the war could end “very soon” as the U.S. engages in peace talks with Iran as it continues to blockade the........

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