Welcome

Welcome to the WhatWarCosts blog. The purpose of this site is to illustrate the costs of the war in terms that the average person can relate to. Most of us have no concept of billions of dollars, much less hundreds of billions of dollars.

This site is designed to facilitate discussion about how we spend our money and the trade-offs that we have to make. Communities across the nation spend weeks, months and decades deciding how to spend much lesser sums of money - in Minnesota, for example, the debate on whether to build a stadium for the Twins lasted more than a decade.

Yet Congress has handed the Bush administration a blank check for the war. And it has done so outside of the usual budget process, through supplemental appropriations.