[Schatze]

You have to remember that even discounting indirect costs, a lot of the war funding is kept out of the official "Iraq War Cost X to Date". Whether it's as simple as using ear marks or supplementals that don't count for the official budget, to the eventual VA costs since the Iraq war has spawned upwards of 40k American casualties by this point (not KIA, wounded; KIA is cheaper, especially with the type of injuries that are coming out of Iraq), to the depletion/procurement/etc. of equipment.

It's actually amazing how far medical science and medicine and military medicine on the battlefield have progressed. Without it, even with superior capabilities, U.S. KIA would be at a similar rate to Vietnam.

Gonna check out this book [edit; not a book, bleargh], but you can really see the fudging when you compare the budgeting for "the Iraq War" versus the GAO's estimates of actual cost.

edit: yes it was the fact that you could change a factory from a refrigerator plant to a munitions plant back to a refrigerator plant, or turn the tank plant into some other plant that really gave the economic boost combined with a huge influx of newly freed workers, many of them from rural backgrounds, to work in these factories.

Not to mention that Iraq is essentially being paid with borrowed money so each year the actual % of the budget allocated to paying off the interests on debts increases and the actual spendable budget itself (relatively) decreases