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Madinat al-Muslimeen Islamic Message Board
| War may cost US $95bn! |
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| Tesseract |
| 03/12/03 at 02:03:39 |
| Assalamu 'alaikum, [url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2831865.stm[/url] US taxpayers will face a bill of up to $95bn for an Iraqi war - and that is assuming the conflict is brief. In its latest number-crunching on the US budget, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) calculated war costs at $24bn a month - although more than half of that has already been spent. The overall direct cost should not exceed $100bn, the government reckons, but analysts have warned that a prolonged conflict or occuption of Iraq could easily end up costing far more. Combined with the effect of tax cuts, the CBO warned that war spending could turn an $891bn cumulative budget surplus for 2004-2013 into a deficit of $1.82 trillion. Only two years ago in 2001, the CBO was suggesting a 10-year surplus of as much as $5.6 trillion. Different ideas The CBO's estimates, needless to say, diverge wildly from those of the White House itself. The Office of Management and Budget - the President's own number-crunchers - sees a first-year deficit of $307bn, $31bn or 9% less than that predicted by the CBO. That still exceeds the $290bn record deficit run up in 1990 when the current incumbent's father was President. And the OMB's own ten-year projection is only $80bn less than the CBO's forecast. Republicans insist that the $1.5 trillion tax cut they are planning, on top of the one passed on a bipartisan basis earlier in the current administration, will kickstart the economy and reinvigorate the tax take. Spend what it takes And despite the CBO's estimates of the cost of war - which mention $9bn to get the troops home again and $1bn-4bn a month for the US's occupation plans - they say that fiscal worries have to take a back seat to security concerns. The economy, however, continues to slide, with February's unemployment figures producing a nasty surprise in the shape of a massive drop in non-farm payrolls. And many economists disagree with the administration on the likely effect of the planned tax cuts, saying they are targeted at the wrong groups and unlikely to feed through to USA Inc's bottom line. |
| India Calculates cost of war! |
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| Tesseract |
| 03/12/03 at 02:07:15 |
| [url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2830899.stm[/url] [quote] India's finance secretary has said a Middle East war would cost his country between $3bn (£1.8bn) and $4bn to pay for more expensive oil imports. [/quote] |
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