Senator criticizes administration’s estimates of war costs

Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., Monday assailed the Bush administration for grossly underestimating the price tag of the war in Iraq and estimated that maintaining an indefinite "Korea-like" military presence there will push the cost up to over $2.5 trillion dollars.

Addressing a meeting of the American Council of Life Insurers in Washington, Conrad said that although administration officials insisted before the 2003 invasion of Iraq that the spending on military operations would not exceed $50 billion, it now totals $567 billion and will surpass $600 billion if Congress approves the president's latest supplemental request of $45.9 billion.

The senator said that keeping a large number of troops there for several decades or more, as in the case of Korea, will add another $2 billion.

In the meanwhile, he said, the amount of "real revenues" flowing into the Treasury has flattened at about $2.1 trillion a year.

"And all of this is happening at the worst possible time, when the baby boomers are about to retire," said Conrad.

He said that his estimated $2 trillion-plus long-term costs of the Iraq war represented half that needed to eliminate the $4 trillion shortfall in Social Security and Medicare funding needed to support the boomers' retirements.

Conrad used his appearance to make another appeal for his proposal, announced late last month, for the creation of a special 16-member bipartisan task force to develop a plan to rein in the national debt, which has soared from $5.8 trillion in 2001 to more than $9 trillion this year.

He said the nation's financial problems have become too serious to be solved through the "normal process" of congressional deliberations.

"I think its going to require an unusual procedure," he said.

Conrad's plan calls for the task force to submit its action blueprint one month after the November 2008 presidential election.

If 12 of the 16 members reached an agreement on a plan, it would go to Congress for a vote on a fast-track basis.

Approval would require three-fifths approval in both houses. The president would have veto power over the plan.

Conrad indicated that part of the solution should be to scuttle Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts.

He said that together with the elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax, the extension of the tax reductions beyond their 2010 expiration date would cost $4.2 trillion.

"That strikes me as not just responsible but wildly irresponsible," Conrad said.