BusinessWeek: A Deafening Silence on War Costs

[Killarney]

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=bw/nf200404308299db013
The government's efforts to downplay the cost of war and delay paying the tab is dismaying. The fiscal irresponsibility does the troops on the ground no good. The accounting gimmickry disillusions citizens with government leaders. The long-term economic price of fiscal irresponsibility measured in terms of jobs and gross domestic product growth is high.

The Administration keeps dancing around money questions, saying a firm answer won't be possible until January, a clear political calculation since that's a time frame well past the November Presidential election. The White House justifies its reluctance to talk fiscal matters by highlighting wartime imponderables while reciting its mantra that it will give the troops what they need.

[dArKeR]

1. MSGOP

Yet White House has a disturbing history of avoiding cost estimates. Remember when economic policymaker Lawrence Lindsay gave out a back-of-the-envelope guesstimate of $100 billion to $200 billion? His figure was quickly disavowed, and Lindsey was shortly out of a job. But it was a respectable guess at the time.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4872035/ By Christopher Farrell BusinessWeek Online