She related her dumbfounded reaction to this discovery to rally goers in Ohio whilst Joseph Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes have been busily promoting their new book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict.”
Nobel economics laureate, professor at Columbia University, former chief economist at the World Bank and Bill Clinton’s former economics adviser, Stiglitz shared this observation with interviewers at Bloomberg.com and Democracy NOW!:
The conflict has driven the nation’s energy costs higher by adding $5 to $10 to the price of a barrel of oil, and may enlarge the national debt by $2 trillion in the year 2017.
Stiglitz and co-author Linda Bilmes, professor of public finance at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, believe the actual increase since 2003 is more than $5 to $10 and offer this reason for low-balling it:
…because we didn’t want to get in a quibble, but really a much larger fraction of the difference between $25 that it was at the time in 2003 and the $100 we face today.
I prefer a quibble to dumbing down. Clinton is encouraging the latter.