This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, March 26, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Five years later in Iraq, 4,000 U.S. soldiers are dead.

But his $3 trillion of fair figure for the full cost of the war.

We get some analysis from Christopher Preble, Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.

I think they build in some assumptions, some kind of Keynesian multipliers and whatnot that probably inflate a little bit what we have already

spent and will spend in the future based on what has already been spent.

So that means veterans benefits and survivor benefits and

all the kind of long-term costs that have been incurred by the five years of war.

However, I think it's important to focus first on what we have

actually spent, the actual money that has been spent on the war which is now approaching 600 billion dollars.

That's actual spending, not long-term projections.

It is important to count long-term projected spending into the total cost of the war and I think

the CBO number gets you somewhere between it's about 1.2 1.3 trillion as I recall. You know that's expensive enough. You don't have to build in a lot of

assumption some of which can be can be questioned or criticized by the supporters of the

war to say,

oh, the war didn't cost 3 trillion, it only cost.

Well, you know, 1.3 or 1.4 looks like a lot of money to me.

And I think, you know, it's important just to step back and again just focus on the on the actual

spending that we are we are spending on Iraq every month. The rule of the

that I like to use is $10 billion a month. It's a rough figure. It's about $10 billion. It's actually, it's somewhere between 12 and 14. But you just use 10. It's a good round number because from $10 billion I can do the math in my head.

That's $1 billion every three days.

That's $333 million every day, and I did have to break out the calculator but that's

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