Linda Bilmes

My name is Linda Bilnes, and I am the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Senior Lecturer Chair in Public Policy and Public Finance at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Well, I spend my time thinking about how society allocates resources.

I think about the roads in Fitchburg, I think about the composting in Somerville, and I also think about how we spend money on wars.

I've been obsessed

with the cost of war since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And as I studied this for years and years and years, I mean, I've seen this real disconnect between the fact that we're talking about billions and even trillions of dollars on costs of war when we're talking about

$6 for after-school basketball in a local community.

I mean, it is this enormous disparity, and I think that partly because of the fact that the words millions, billions, and trillions rhymes in English, we don't even really fully grasp the scale of the spending on wars.

And trillions are order of magnitude bigger than billions.

I always tell my students, like, a billion seconds ago is like

you know, in the 90s when The Lion King came out, and trillions is woolly mammoth era.

You know, you're talking about a long time ago.

My students in my introductory public finance class started asking me, how much is this costing?

And I said, that's a good question.

And when I started looking into how much it was costing, I realized that the government was not really adding it up.

And to the extent they were, they were drastically underestimating the cost.

And they were underestimating the costs partly because of the way that we were budgeting for the wars, which didn't lead to a large paper trail of explanations of spending, and partly because of the way we think about spending for wars and all the costs that we don't include.

Well, I mean, the Bush administration was saying at the very beginning of the U.S.

invasion of Iraq that it was going to cost not very much.

It was going to cost a few billion dollars, maybe $50 billion.