Education, economy feeling effects of war costs

Although the economy has been at the forefront of recent political debates, the Iraq War remains a hot button issue for students and professors voting in the upcoming presidential election.

The war in Iraq has lasted longer than World War I, World War II, and the Civil War, is the most expensive war in the history of the United States and has cost Americans thousands of lives, said Matthew Jarvis, assistant professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton. He added that the war in Iraq is among the biggest mistakes of the Bush administration.

The way this war has been paid for is unconventional compared to how other presidents have handled the costs of war in the past. Previous presidents generally tried to balance spending and debt by raising taxes to pay for wars such as WWII and the Vietnam War, Jarvis said.

To pay for the Iraq War, the United States has used its credit cards and caused the deficit to reach a record high of $482 billion dollars and has been ignoring the past due notices, Jarvis added.
 
“The huge amounts of money spent in Iraq over the past few years could have been spent in other areas such as education,” said Maryam Marzara, CSUF's Associated Students Inc. executive vice president.
 
The cost of maintaining the U.S. presence in Iraq is roughly $720 million per day. The money that is spent on war each day could pay to put 34,904 students through four years of state college, according to the American Friends Service Committee's analysis of the works of Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz and Harvard public finance lecturer, Linda J. Bilmes.

Wars are usually profitable, Jarvis said, but the Iraq War is running a deficit, which makes it harder for the government to spend money on other things. By spending these huge amounts of borrowed money in Iraq, “it’s like your tying one hand behind your back,” Jarvis said.

When President George Bush took office, there was a budget surplus left behind from the Clinton administration. During the two terms of Bush's presidency, the deficit has increased by over three trillion dollars, Jarvis said. He added that the Bush administration has spent unnecessary amounts of borrowed money that eventually need to be paid back.
“This war has hurt our economy in a way where everyone was feeling the pinch, and now is feeling the punch,” Marzara said.
 
According to antiwar.com, which has tracked the number of American military casualties in Iraq since the start of the war in March of 2003, over 4,000 American troops have been killed. Over 30,000 have been injured or wounded.

“Society has had to make necessary sacrifices for our nation’s safety; however, the Bush administration's tactics have been ineffective,” Tim Lee, a 21-year-old communications major, said.

The National Priorities Project, a Massachusetts-based group that tracks the impact of federal spending on local communities, estimates the cost of war in Iraq at over $500 billion for the U.S. California's share is over $70 billion, and the Orange County community's share is $7 billion.

"Knowing how much money has been spent on the war just makes me hate the war even more," Michelle Schiavo, a 22-year-old communications major, said.
Schiavo said she will be voting for Barack Obama partly because of his campaign promises to withdraw the troops.

Even though the war has affected the economy, the effects are not as severe as they will be in the future, Jarvis said.
“Is the economy bad as the direct result of the war? No. Not yet,” Jarvis said. He added that the war has had some affect on the decrease in the quality of life for Americans at this time and that the effect will become stronger because we eventually have to pay for this debt.

Though cause and affect is a rhetorical tactic, the war will eventually take its toll on the economy down the road, Jarvis said. The economy and the war in Iraq remain two of the most important issues in the upcoming presidential elections.

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