Math phobia

This is the kind of number that scares even me: 180,000 to 360,000 traumatic brain injuries, mainly concussions, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The costs of caring for these troops is going to be immense, as my college classmate Linda Bilmes has documented and estimated at a time when I'm sure the projected cost was lower.

In the long run, we'll spend much, much more on these injuries than on Obama's stimulus plan, even if you measure it in present value as you should.

One thing concerns me: We have this vague 10% to 20% rate of injury released by the Pentagon. It appears to be the same rate "determined" by Rand Corp., updated to the now-greater cohort.

Why don't we have a more precise rate? We can't be happy with the implied error bar. Isn't anyone trying to get better data?

Or is this another fundamental refusal of the Bushists to even look at what they don't want to see? Now, that's a phobia.

Our grandchildren's money

Unsigned editorials are seldom useful, but this one is an exception. It's really a news analysis and should have run on the front page, but still, it contains a strong fact basis that everyone should be aware of.

In the run-up to the war, President Bush's top economic adviser, Larry Lindsey, said it might cost as much as $200 billion. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the actual amount would be just $50 billion to $60 billion, calling Lindsey's projection "baloney," much as Rumsfeld had belittled General Eric Shinseki's estimate that it would take several hundred thousand US troops to fight the war successfully.

Both Lindsey and Rumsfeld were far from the mark. Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University's Linda Bilmes have just published "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict," and they consider that figure a conservative estimate.

$3 trillion! It's a debt that our grandchildren will find hard to pay off.

Update: From Linda Bilmes, more detail.