Your tax dollars at work

Yesterday, when Blogger was hosed even worse than it is this morning, Nick Kristof wrote in the New York Times about how the money being squandered in Iraq could be better spent:

For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.

[snip]

“The total costs of the war, including the budgetary, social and macroeconomic costs, are likely to exceed $2 trillion,” Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-winning economist at Columbia, writes in an updated new study with Linda Bilmes, a public finance specialist at Harvard. Their report has just appeared in the Milken Institute Review, as an update on a paper presented earlier this year.

Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush’s financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project.

[snip]

The bottom line is that not only have we squandered 2,800 American lives and considerable American prestige in Iraq, but we’re also paying $18,000 per household to do so.

To paraphrase Jeff Probst, wanna know what you're paying for?

Overhead costs have consumed more than half the budget of some reconstruction projects in Iraq, according to a government estimate released yesterday, leaving far less money than expected to provide the oil, water and electricity needed to improve the lives of Iraqis.

The report provided the first official estimate that, in some cases, more money was being spent on housing and feeding employees, completing paperwork and providing security than on actual construction.

Those overhead costs have ranged from under 20 percent to as much as 55 percent of the budgets, according to the report, by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. On similar projects in the United States, those costs generally run to a few percent.

The highest proportion of overhead was incurred in oil-facility contracts won by KBR Inc., the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root, which has frequently been challenged by critics in Congress and elsewhere.

[snip]

One oil contract awarded to a joint venture between Parsons, an American company, and Worley, from Australia, had overhead costs of at least 43 percent, the report found. One contract held by Parsons alone to build hospitals and prisons had overhead of at least 35 percent; in another, it was 17 percent.

The lowest figure was found for certain contracts won by Lucent, at 11 percent, but the report indicates that substantial portions of the overhead in those cases could not be determined.

The report did not explain why KBR’s overhead costs on those contracts — the contracts totaled about $296 million — were more than 10 percent higher than those at the other companies audited. Despite past criticism of KBR, the Army, which administers those contracts, has generally agreed to pay most of the costs claimed by the company.

Isn't it funny how whenever the high cost in Iraq comes up, the company billing the government the most always comes up as Halliburton or KBR -- the company that Dick Cheney used to head and which still pays him $150,000 a year, and in which he still has $18 million in stock options which are now worth $69 million? But of course Mr. Cheney's financial interests have ABSOLUTELY NO impact on the government decision to give Halliburton/KBR no-bid contracts and look the other way on cost overruns, right?

So next time your friends start ranting about the Mexicans down the street using up all the health care dollars taking their kids to the emergency room, you might remind them of the huge sums of their tax dollars being shoveled into Dick Cheney's pocket from these contracts.