Peter Maer of CBS News Radio asked: "What's your advice to the average American who is hurting now, facing the prospect of $4-a-gallon gasoline, a lot of people facing ... "
"Wait, what did you just say?" the president interrupted. "You're predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline?"
Maer responded: "A number of analysts are predicting $4-a-gallon gasoline."
Bush's rejoinder: "Oh, yeah? That's interesting. I hadn't heard that."
The president, once known for his common-guy skills, sounded eerily like his father, who in 1992 seemed amazed to discover that supermarkets had bar-code scanners.
The $4-a-gallon forecasts were reported widely in newspapers and on TV in the past week. The White House press secretary took a question about $4 gas at her Wednesday media briefing. A poll last month found that nearly three-quarters of Americans expect $4-a-gallon gas.
The president, however, had difficulty grasping the possibility, even after Maer told him.
"You just said the price of gasoline may be up to $4 a gallon — or some expert told you that," Bush repeated. "That creates a lot of uncertainty."
...
At a Shell service station in San Mateo, Calif., the price of a gallon of regular had already reached $4.29, well above the California average of $3.42, as measured by AAA.
In other reality-based cost news, Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz has co-authored (with Linda Bilmes) a new book in which they estimate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will cost the U.S. more than $3 trillion -- with the final tally likely to exceed that.
"It's much more like five trillion," Stiglitz said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. "We were trying to make Americans understand how expensive this war was so we didn't want to quibble about a dime here or a dime there."The estimate drew criticism: Senator Sam Brownback (R, TX) said the number ignores the price the U.S. would pay if Iraq became a terrorist state. [I would argue that, in fact, this is the price the U.S. has paid to create a terrorist state in Iraq.] And a White House spokesman criticized Stiglitz, saying the war on terrorism is, well, priceless:
...
"This war is the first war ever that's been totally financed by borrowing, by deficits,'' said Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York. "Because we haven't raised taxes, because we've tried to pretend this war is for free, we've been skimping on our treatment of veterans."
Now, maybe the book makes the political/moral judgment that $3 trillion spent on Iraq is wrong, but so far, the criticisms seem to be that there has been a cost accounting done at all -- and for saying that this is the first time we've waged a war without any effort at financing it. Again, I would argue that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq -- which had no WMDs and no link to Al Qaeda -- has had little, if anything, to do with preventing "attacks on the homeland.""People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can't even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9-11," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, conceding that the costs of the war on terrorism are high while questioning the premise of Stiglitz's research.
"It is also an investment in the future safety and security of Americans and our vital national interests. $3 trillion? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn't his slide rule work that way?"
And (I am not making this up) Karl Rove claims that
If we were to give up Iraq with the third largest oil reserves in the world to the control of an Al Qaida regime or to the control of Iran, don’t you think $200 a barrel oil would have a cost to the American economy.Er, isn't the fact that we've effectively turned Iraq over to the control of Iran one of the few uncontested facts of the American-sponsored "regime change" in Iraq?
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