About the Book
Apart from its tragic human toll, the Iraq War will be staggeringly expensive in financial terms. In The Three Trillion Dollar War, Nobel Prize winner Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda J. Bilmes cast 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.
- Buy the book here.
- Read more about Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes.
- Selected book reviews and articles about The Three Trillion Dollar War.
- Interviews with Stiglitz and Bilmes about The Three Trillion Dollar War.
- “War at Any Cost? The Total Economic Costs of the War Beyond the Federal Budget,” written testimony for the Joint Economic Committee, February 28, 2008 (PDF)
- “The $3 Trillion War,” an excerpt from the book, in Vanity Fair, April 2008 issue.