There was a great article from
http://firedoglake.com/2008/12/20/the-cost-of-conservatism-in-trillions/">firedoglake the other day, and it is something that has really bothered me over the past few weeks, looking forward at the great pile of shit Dubya has left for us.
Let's engage in a back of the envelope exercise for a moment: the cost of conservatism to America. Right wingers want to de-emphasize the costs, and pump up the virtues. They want to account for every penny of liberal projects but declare that conservative projects have no price. Take
http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/10/news/economy/costofwar.fortune/index.htm">Lawrence Lindsey for example. The Iraq War is a treasure beyond price. But he offers a standard: what's the value over 15 years, with 300 trillion of total output? Well let's break down the cost in a kind of rough and ready way.
The costs of conservatism, in a bi-partisan form, are those things that can't be fixed by a Democratic President because they have become part of the political landscape: over-financialization of the American economy, the waste of privatized health care, over militarization of the American economy, and the externalization of global warming. Each one of these things has a cost in GDP, and we can take that total over Lindsey's preferred time frame of 15 years. Then we can ask what that costs in the present.
The cost of not having comprehensive national health care is roughly
http://www.pnhp.org/facts/single_payer_resources.php">5% of GDP because America spends 15% of GDP on health care, and a comprehensive system generally saves 1/3 over privatized systems. The cost of over financialization is
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/opinion/19krugman.html?_r=1&em">estimated by Krugman to be 3% of GDP. The difference between the Bush defense department, including the neo-colonial wars, is 2% of GDP, that's defense plus .
The cost of global warming? Harder to say, in 2005, the mean of estimates surveyed by Tol was
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2W-4CJCVJ8-2&_user=3061873&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=3061873&md5=32f9c1afcc395c31e07e04fb70adbd0a">93 dollars a ton. The news has gotten worse since then, with many of the low estimates that dragged down the median already being disproved. But let's be cautious and take that number for the moment. That's 4% of GDP, but we have to take the present value of that first, since it is over a long time horizon - from that we get roughly 2% of GDP. I could easily double this number by tossing out the large numbers of estimates which rely on scenarios which have already been trashed by the facts.
Added up, this is
12% of output, or using Lindsey's 15 year time frame 36 trillion dollars. These problems reinforce each other, insurance companies shift output from other activities, to financial ones. Spending on wars means there is less productive manufacturing, and more war manufacturing, pushing effort into juggling money. Tax breaks drain investment from private enterprise, making it harder, seemingly to shift the economy. In other words, we are like the person who drinks too much because they smoke too much.
So what's the value of that, right now? Well, taking a real interest rate of 2%, that's the historical value roughly, and compounding monthly, that's a present value of 27 trillion real 2008 dollars. Or about twice the value of everything Americans are going to do this year. Ross Perot and others like to talk about the cost of unfunded liabilities, like Social Security and Medicare, running to a present future value of 40 trillion. It's the same kind of back of the envelope number as presented here - based on a present future value of estimates of a long term stream. This means that the cost, over 15 years, of conservatism to America, is two thirds of the supposed crisis in costs - out to an infinite time horizon.
So what does this exercise mean? It's really very simple: we can afford a decent retirement and decent living standards, and decent medicine for ourselves and our children and grand children, or we can afford the casino games that we have played, and the massive parade ground military that we have built over the last generation. But not both. The
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/08/1042">costs of the war and
http://money.cnn.com/2007/10/23/news/economy/iraq_costs/">bad economic policy flow all through the economy.
The reality is that
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/035468oped.html">liberalism isn't broken. The reality, contra the film IOU-USA, is that the national debt is a
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hale-stewart/lets-add-more-debt-to-the_b_114692.html">symptom not a cause. The real cause is that Americans have voted for certain things - a huge military, a casino economy, and an anti-science bias - cost be damned. Well the cost is damning, it is damning us to this recession, and it is going to damn us to a very poor recovery on the other side of it.
Yes, these are back of the envelope numbers, but we've been living on pulled from flatulant air numbers on things like WMD in Iraq, the cost of the Bush tax package, the future of global warming, and the value of Mortgage Backed Securities.
One thing the article fails to mention is the future productivity of the lives lost unnecessarily during the Bush Regime. Perhaps 9/11 could have been prevented, so I'll only go into the things we could have definitely avoided. Over
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june08/warcost_03-26.html">4,200 soldier's lives lost in Iraq in the six years we have been there. Over
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/1-over-one-million-iraqi-deaths-caused-by-us-occupation/">1.2 million innocent Iraqi civilians killed simply by our presence.
Think of the lives lost just by Bush and his destructive decisions, how many people are now in graves, how many lives have been damaged. Think of the rights our founding fathers paid in blood for that are now being systemically stripped for us in the name of "our protection." The true cost of conservative rule to this country is mind-boggling when you consider that since Reagan, real wages of the average worker in this country (after inflation) have actually gone down. These are the numbers you cannot quantify-- what if union membership hasn't decreased by 66% in the past 30 years? What if we didn't choose to deregulate investment banks in 2004? When you take all the bad decisions made in this country, the true cost of conservatism is, indeed, "priceless."