$2,000,000,000,000

That's a whole bunch of zeroes isn't it? That is also what Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize winning economist and Robert Hormats, of Goldman Sachs International, project it will cost American taxpayers for the Iraq War (or the Intervention of Iraq, to save us from those nasty WMDs).

Bob Herbert of the New York Times explores this in a bit more detail here. An excerpt:

Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.