The financial cost of America’s “war on terror” is usually hidden from public view.
Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce from 1999 to 2001 and lecturer of budgeting and public finance at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote recently in the New York Times that, “if the American military presence in the [Middle East] region lasts another five years, the total outlay for the war could stretch to more than $1.3 trillion, or $11,300 for every household in the United States.”