Iraq War Cost Impacts on Housing and Other Programs: VA Disability Payments.

Every dollar spent in Iraq is a dollar less available for other purposes, including but not limited to, housing.

I have begun reading a new book, The Three Trillion Dollar War. (Fresh Air NPR story on the book HERE). It's written by a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz, and is packed with facts, figures, and footnotes that support his three trillion dollar cost conclusion.

As I work my way through the book my plan is to highlight data to illustrate the scale of the true financial costs of the war (the political and personal costs are already well documented).

Maybe because I am a Vietnam vet one of the first items to get my attention was the number of veterans receiving veterans disability payments, and the cost of those payments, as covered in Chapter 3 of the book.

Some key data:

• 3.5 million veterans now receive disability benefits, annual cost $34.5 billion, average benefit $8,890.
• More than 900,000 recipients from Vietnam war
• More than 210,000 recipients from first Gulf war (About 40% of first Gulf war veterans by my calculation), $4.3 Billion annually
• Pending claim backlog December 2007: 400,000+
  

Iraq- Afghanistan Wars

• 1.6 million troops have been deployed so far to Iraq and Afghanistan
• 31% (224,000) of 751,000 discharged have filed claims through Dec.07, (Claims approval rate as of summer '07 was 90%), $1.3 billion annually.
  
• 2012 Projection: 405,000 claims filed, $3.1 billion annually
• 2017 Projection: 712,000 claims filed, $6.2 billion annually