The Cost of Conservatism, in Trillions from Firedoglake

excerpt from http://firedoglake.com/2008/12/20/the-cost-of-conservatism-in-trillions/

So what does this exercise mean? It's really very simple: we can afford a decent retirement and decent living standards, and decent medicine for ourselves and our children and grand children, or we can afford the casino games that we have played, and the massive parade ground military that we have built over the last generation. But not both. The costs of the war and bad economic policy flow all through the economy.

The reality is that liberalism isn't broken. The reality, contra the film IOU-USA, is that the national debt is a symptom not a cause. The real cause is that Americans have voted for certain things - a huge military, a casino economy, and an anti-science bias - cost be damned. Well the cost is damning, it is damning us to this recession, and it is going to damn us to a very poor recovery on the other side of it.

Yes, these are back of the envelope numbers, but we've been living on pulled from flatulant air numbers on things like WMD in Iraq, the cost of the Bush tax package, the future of global warming, and the value of Mortgage Backed Securities.