Last week, the National Priorities Project released a state-by-state report on the costs of the War in Iraq.

This publication provides breakdowns by state and congressional district on the human and financial costs of the Iraq War. It also shows what a half trillion in Iraq War spending could buy each congressional district in local services.

The data “is based on an analysis of the legislation in which Congress has allocated money for war so far and research by the Congressional Research Service which has access to Department of Defense financial reports. The trade-offs are based on average cost per unit information for each state.”

According to the report, the War in Iraq has cost Louisiana nearly $3.5 billion.

Of the 3,653 soliders killed in Iraq, 74 were from Louisiana, and of the 26,953 soliders wounded in Iraq, 535 are from Louisiana.

Broken down by Congressional district, the cost splits as follows:

01 Jindal $614.95 million

02 Jefferson $414.18 million

03 Melancon $518.48 million

04 McCrery $467.43 million

05 Alexander $413.05 million

06 Baker $570.24 million

07 Boustany Jr. $473 million

Here in Louisiana’s 5th Congressional District, $413 million could have been spent instead on the following:

· Health care coverage for 105,162 people—or 273,609 kids, or
· Head Start for 62,398 additional kids, or
· 8,716 new elementary school teachers, or
· 93,471 scholarships to make college more affordable, or
· Renewable electricity for 299,255 homes, or
· 4,963 affordable housing units, or
· 12,719 public safety officers to keep the streets safe, or
· 6,444 port container inspectors for Louisiana

For more information, visit the National Priorities Project’s full report.

You can review Congressional District breakdowns at Moveon.Org.

3 thoughts

  1. Even if we were to assume that the war in Iraq had, at one time, a noble purpose, much of the money spent and the lives lost have come after Saddam was deposed. Many of our military leaders have been critical of the war, for Pres. Bush going into Iraq without sufficient material or manpower. We are now bogged down in an internal civil war similar to Vietnam. Now that we had rid Iraq of Saddam, it is up to the Iraqi people to determine their own fate, as we did in our revolution against Britain.

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  2. So this may be slightly off topic, but has anyone taken a tally of what the last year’s worth of city council bickering has cost Alexandria?

    I can’t help but wonder as I read all the reports of them hiring attorneys and more than anything having the knowledge that they are wasting so much time with this petty infighting that it must be costing the city serious amounts of money both directly and indirectly via lost opportunities.

    The fact that they have only managed to stop playing politics long enough to pass a “saggy pants ordinance” shows the obscure obsolescence of some council member’s views on the role of city government.

    It would be interesting to get an idea of what this whole year-long fiasco has actually cost in dollars.

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  3. If you haven’t seen it yet, google “Dick Cheney on You Tube” and watch his interview from 1994 as to why NOT invading Baghdad at the end of the first Gulf War was the absolute right action. Why hasn’t the “liberal biased mainstream media” aired this footage since the saber rattling began 5 years ago??? Cheney asserts the 146 American lives lost back then was a great expense. Can he count to 4,000, the number of casualties we’re approaching now?

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