Americans get low-balled

[Skybird]

http://www.juancole.com/2006/04/cost-of-war-heading-toward-one.html

Quote:
"Cost of War Heading toward One Trillion Dollars

Some less ethical automobile salesmen will deploy a tactic called "low-balling." The young naive couple comes in and sees a coupe they like. They think it is beyond their means, maybe in the $30,000s. He'll quote them $26,000. There will be financing. They get excited. Maybe, just maybe, it can work. They can have their dream car. So the salesman says, let me talk to my boss. The couple sits in the car. They dream of driving it home. The salesman comes back glum, shuffling with embarrassment. My manager, he says, over-ruled me. We couldn't let it go for less than $32,000. So the couple is crushed. But they had already driven the car home in their minds. They liked the color of the floor model. They ran their fingers over the upholstery. They smelled the newness inside. O.K. They'll cut back on luxuries. No vacation for a few years. They sign up. It comes to $35,000 loaded.

This item says that Bush administration officials told the American people that the Iraq War would cost $50 billion. A reader reminds me that the head of US AID actually put the cost at $1.7 billion. Paul Wolfowitz, that great economist now neoliberalizing the World Bank, even implied that Iraqi petroleum would pay for Iraq reconstruction. The cost of the war is rising toward a thousand billion dollars, i.e. a short-scale $1 trillion. Bush is still keeping this sum off the official budget (why?), and so it does not show up in the official figures for the budget deficit. But the money for the war is being borrowed, so that our grandchildren will still be debt slaves of Halliburton and Boeing. Folks, we've done been low-balled. The difference between us and that young couple with the coupe, though is at least they have a coupe. We've got rubble in the Middle East for our $1 trillion, on which we're paying interest every month. "

Quote end.



Mind you that the costs for the Iraq war had been calculated in the range of 1.5 to 3 trillion dollars so far by economists. Two or three months ago.

[PeriscopeDepth]

This analogy seems to assume the taxpayers pulled they trigger. They didn't, the all powerful (at least when it comes to foreign affairs) executive branch did. They bought the coupe, the taxpayers will pay for it.

Granted, that at the time the taxpayers probably WOULD have pulled the trigger. But even if before the war public opinion was 60/40 in favor of no war, would it have made a difference? I think the decision had been made months, if not years before the start of the war.

PD

[Sixpack]

If action will come against Iran, the UN would have no choice but to take all of their oil until the immense debt is fully paid off.

Should do the same thing in Iraq.

Liberation comes at a price :know: :hulk:

[Skybird]

Liberation looks different than what I see in Iraq, I think.

Iran: early this week strategists and economists in German TV calculated the costs for it for european economies alone, no matter if joining the war or not, for all the private households, business, everything. Amongst other factors it would translate into the loss of 250-350 thousand jobs in the first year in Germany alone. The financial costs for three war scenarios they lined out (all of them varying degrees of air-heavy campaigns) are expected to top the costs for Iraq until now - but after "just after 9-12 months". the costs for the impact on general oil trade "are beyond calculation". It is very unlikely, for these reasons, that America will get even as much support for an Iran war than they got for Iraq - which was a split affair, at best.

Couldn't hurt to be more careful in wishing for war with Iran. From the very beginning on I always said, and still say: it hurts us significantly more than them, iran is in a far stronger position than we are, Europe and america as well. May hurt our egos, but it is fqact in my eyes. I see absolutely no reason to risk such a dangerous high-risk-match right now, or soon. Negroponte, if I am not mistaken he currently is the director and/or coordinator of American intel services, said just days ago that according to American information Iran is "several years" away from having enough material to built nuclear weapons. No matter if it is true or not - even American propaganda efforts to influence the UN or world opinion are >relatively< tame, compared to the skyrocketing efforts there have been before Iraq.

Simple truth is, economically and financially we simply can't afford a war with Iran, nothing else than this. And our people have a far less capacity to suffer than the Iranians, living in a harsher country since long, and not being used to the level of luxury we take as granted.

[Sixpack]

I said pretty much the same things lately, only with less words ;)

[DeepSix]

If action will come against Iran, the UN would have no choice but to take all of their oil until the immense debt is fully paid off.
...

Don't hold your breath.

[Sixpack]

You thought I was serious ?

Ah, if only .....the good old days.....war prize.

[kiwi_2005]

Is it because of this friggin iraqi war it now cost me $70 friggin bucks to fill up my car with petrol yet a yr ago it cost $40. And petrol prices i am told will still go up :nope:

Time to buy me a bicycle :yep:

[Sea Demon]

Time to buy me a bicycle :yep:

:yep: :yep: The good news is that we'll all be more physically fit. ;)

[tycho102]

I knew it would cost a pretty penny. The Marshall Plan cost a pretty penny.

I only question how the actual money is being spent, and the tactics employed. Giving Haliburton $30 billion, and them only doing $5 billion of actual physical work, is a very poor tax-money laundering scheme. All things considered, I'd rather that $25 billion slush fund go to GE's nuclear division, rather than Haliburton's petroleum division.




Keep the economy running, sure; but I'd like to it run a different direction than just petroleum.

[Type941]

sorry, but you went to the dealership with your uncle whom you trust and he picked the car for you. now deal with it.

translation - you voted for bush and his VP, now you got what you got. use democracy to get rid of him, or stop whining and help Iraq. take responsibility for feks sake, what do you think bombing a country would do? Bush in 2nd term never made any secrets of his plans. yet he got elected - so you get what you get, no 2 ways about it.

[Skybird]

Brazil was clever, they switched their transportation system after the oil crisis in the 70s from oil to ethanol. Today they are almost invulnerable to any oil crisis there could be. Even if there would be a halt in oil production, they could carry on. Ethanol not only added to every kind of gasoline - the overwhelming majority of cars seem to run on ethanol there.

A country of that size can afford to plant the needed fields for that. Yesterday they indicated on CNN that it should be possible in the US, too. The scaninavians are planning something likt that, too, and want to reach oil-independency within the next 13 years. If it could work for densly croweded, small countries like the central european ones I cannot judge, but I have some doubts. Is there enough room to plant as many fields as needed to switch all traffic to ethanol basis?

The technology to produce ethanol-efficient cars is there, GM produces cars like that, and other car manufacturers as well. They even sell them, even on the American market, but their quantity, compared to oil-based cars, is still extremely low. As long as they think having access to all oil that they want is their birth right, it will not change.

Wait until the barrel oil will cost 120, 150 dollars, and climbing - it's only a question of time. That will be fun. And everyone of us will be hit by it, and hard. Even if you do not own a car - just think of heating your flats and houses. Last year's heating costs, I learned two weeks ago, cost me 50% more than in the years before. There will be a similar raise this year, and in the coming ones, probably. Sooner or later this will become a serious problem for household's finances - only a question of time.

They also said that noone outside the Saudi government actually knows how much poil they have left in their sand. It is the top one state secret of Saudi-Arabaia, which obviously has not the smallest financial interest in letting anyone know. remember that next time some self-declared expert tells you about the oil reserves that are left - outside the top of their government, noone can say that. It's a family secret, so to speak.

[The Avon Lady]

Necessity is the mother of invention.

[Skybird]

True, but time is of the essence. Was one energy analysts asked in yesterday's program if he hears the clock ticking. Said he: "I stopped hearing it ticking a longer while ago." I feel the same way. For example, car manufacturers in Europe and america have different design philosophies. But in both regions, engines became more and more economic. that had different conseqeunces for car designs. The european cars are more economic today, becasue they are smaller and lighter, but their American rivals did not conserve the economic gains in engine design, so that they would build cars with lower gas consumption, but they started to build bigger cars with more powerful engines available. The economical engines that way were used not to operate with lower gas rates, but to run around heavier weight and more mass. Fuel consumption, nationwide, did not drop for that reason, althoiugh engine technology had become more efficient and economic: the new reserves were wasted for bigger size. A GM speaker yesterday said that is the reason why modern US cars still are suffering from an energy-efficiency "that is on the level of 20 to 30 years ago".

China also does not read the sign of times. They are still building their economy, one would think that is a phantastic chnace to avoid the mistakes we have done in the West and learn from them - wrong! The best they could do, said an analyst, is to learn how to build an economy from scratch that is independend from oil, like the brazilians did. Instead they are designing their economy to be totally dependent on oil. Seen that way, under today's presigns, they do everything wrong that could be done wrong, and wasting one of the biggest chances in the whole 5 millenias of their history.

The future looks grim, and I share Woolsey's assessment, and that of other analysts, that the future will hold energy wars after energy wars. Iraq already has been one of that, and in the iran business, influence on distribution pattern s of energy reserves again is the keyword. One guy even said it easily could end up in national desintegration, leading to medieval conditions were cities battle versus cities, for energy and water only.

More vocabularies need to be mentioned here: asymmetrical warfare, giving up the state's monopol on military power, a boom in the mercenary business that holds for several years now, outsourcing of military potentials. Add to that proliferation, different egocentric interests of Russia, EU, China and the US, and call it all survival of the fittest, and the future does not shine bright anymore. An increase in frequency and amplitude of natural desasters and weather phenomenons, an epidemic spread of civilizational deseases (diabetes, obesity, coronar deseases, social-psychological deseases) and the crushing effects on communal finances this will mean, and an ongoing epidemic spread of AIDS in underdeveloeped parts of the world, plus tropical deseases speading to the north, following the warming of the climate in various zones that had been colder before, all are only the spice on the cake. I do not think we progress into an evolutionary future. I think we step back to centuries that we all believed had been overcome since long. History does not move in linear progression, instead it keeps running in cycles. And our civilizational climax lies far behind us.

Necessity is mother of invention. But you need time to adopt. Too much time already has been wasted, I fear. The bill comes with a delay, but it will be a very massive one, and many will not be able to pay for it. First signs are already there. That almost noone reacts to them is not encouraging. History holds plenty of examples were local civilizations, city-states and communities acted the same way - and seized to exist for that reason. We are travelling the same road, I think.

[The Avon Lady]

This just reminds me of the scientific experts in the 70s predicting that by the year 2000, there would not be enough clean air to sustain humanity.

I've read several articles so far on the potential availability of petroleum over the next 2 decades. While the predictions are for less, it won't be that much less and this will be offset by new energy-efficient and alternate energy technologies already employed or under development. And more will come.

I'm all for reducing energy consumption, cleaning the environment and making planet earth a nicer, cleaner place to live and starting this as of yesteryear. But I wouldn't panic at this point in time.

EDIT: I agree with the claim that the US is doing too little in this direction. A more interesting discusssion would be whether energy industries and their political allies are what's hindering America's weening of of petroleum products.

[GunnersMate]

Didnt everyone think that the Iraq War was all about getting oil? :88) :dead:

[scandium]

Didnt everyone think that the Iraq War was all about getting oil? :88) :dead:

More about gaining control over it, among other reasons (none of them the ones that were publicly stated). Of course its not going as well as expected. Probably due to the Iraqis greeting the US with RPGs and IEDs instead of flowers and candy. Whoda thunk it?