The 50 Trillion Dollar War . . .

. . . making the rounds lately are the economist who put out a book that has inflated the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom, along with the ongoing project of rebuilding Iraq, at 3 Trillion dollars.

Much of the additional 2.2 Trillion in cost over the official estimates comes from little tricks of estimation, speculation and pure 'pulled straight from our asses' guess work.

Two can play at that game. There's a war that's been a bigger failure, and been going on for far longer, and I think I can reasonably estimate this conflict's cost at a cool 50 Trillion (give or take 10).

I'm talking about the combined War on Poverty and War on Drugs, which in effect are the same war, and arose at about the same time. These efforts, begun under Johnson, expanded under Nixon and Ford, unchallenged by Carter, and finally resisted by Reagan, have easily cost this country magnitudes more in terms of human misery, government spending, lost tax revenues, and actual lives, than even the most outlandish estimates of the Iraqi front on the War on Terror.

I don't have a whole book to flesh out the details, but it could be done, easily. The first costs to tally would be the dissolution of families amongst the urban poor. That was a direct result of a government welfare system that perversely encouraged out of wedlock births. The best positive correlation between the outcomes of one generation to the next is having a stable two parent household, and that became a distant memory amongst those most reliant on government handouts in less than a decade of an expanded welfare state. The costs of this one change easily dwarves that of Iraq. Not only do you have the welfare checks, which if they were all adjusted to today's dollars going all the way back to the mid-sixties would be a considerable sum. You also have on the negative side of the ledger, the potential income those children would have earned had a system been in place that encouraged familial stability, academic performance, and an intrinsic desire to contribute to society as a whole. Poverty needn't breed more poverty, but the welfare system as it existed during the 60s and 70s did just that, and the 30 years it took to begin to seriously challenge that pernicious system did tremendous damage.

The War on Drugs started much the same time, for much the same reasons, and had many of the same negative effects. Just focusing on incarceration alone, and you begin to total up some huge numbers. Again, if you borrow the methodology employed in getting to that 3 Trillion number on Iraq, then by also calculating the positive contributions all those prisoners would have made had they not been incarcerated, then you are talking real money.

So why is it so natural for economists of a certain political bent to so easily attack a war they don't like with that sort of methodology, but a couple of wars with a much longer history and much more certain outcomes seems to have avoided coming under the type of analysis they advocate on the War on Terror?