To date, as of tonight, is $463 billion. (As you read this, it’s more like ###.) There’s really no way to think of this number in any way that makes sense. What got me thinking about it was the Superconducting Super Collider, canceled by the republicans, because it was just insanely expensive at $12 billion. We could have built 38 of them by now. That’s right, 38. Wow. How does this compare, to say, the international space station? The total costs of the space station through 2010 are estimated at $130 billion. So, we could nearly have four ISS’s for the cost of the war… to date. By 2010, if the spending continues as it has today, the war will have earned us another 1.5 ISS’s. These numbers for war cost are on the low side, and doesn’t include any long-term equipment costs.

You can play this game lots of ways. Some sites estimate the cost at $4,100 per US household. Or $3,791 per Iraqi (I don’t know if this number counts the dead ones or not). We’d certainly have been better off just trying to buy Iraq.

I wonder how many folks would still support the war if we gave them the choice of getting a tax refund of $4,100 or going to war. Not that we had/have the money to do either.

Even if you persist in the insane belief that the Iraq war was necessary, or good, can you seriously think that it’s been good enough or necessary enough to justify the cost? Where the hell are the fiscal conservatives?