Reassessing The Cost Of The Post-9/11 Era, Post Bin Laden (between $4 trillion and $6 trillion)

Reassessing The Cost Of The Post-9/11 Era, Post Bin Laden

Dan Froomkin
froomkin@huffingtonpost.com

Posted: 05/11/11 08:22 AM ET



WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden's death doesn’t end the post-9/11 era, but it does provide an occasion to look back at everything that’s happened since the attacks nearly 10 years ago and reassess the costs.

There’s the human toll. More than twice as many Americans -- over 6,000 -- have now died in the two wars that followed 9/11 than did in the original attacks, along with more than 100,000 Iraqis and Afghans. Over three million Iraqis and 400,000 Afghans remain displaced. Several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers suffer from long-term war-related injuries and health problems, with more than 200,000 diagnosed with traumatic brain injury alone.

The actual 9/11 attacks produced insured losses of about $40 billion and delivered a temporary blow to the economy. But that was just the very beginning of the financial hemorrhage.

Harvard scholar Linda Bilmes and Nobel-Prize winning Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz now estimate that the two post-9/11 wars will end up costing taxpayers somewhere between $4 trillion and $6 trillion. That includes not only money already appropriated for the military campaigns ($1.3 trillion at last count), but also the immense cost of long-term health care for returning soldiers, and such things as interest payments on all the extra borrowed money and the increased volatility of oil prices since the invasion of Iraq.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/11/reassessing-the-cost-of-9-11-bin-laden_n_860186.html