Idle doodling at lunch.

I keep hearing the figure $10 billion a month being bandied about for the cost of the war, I think just the Iraq portion of it.

That's a big number. So, I was curious - how did that compare to the cost per month of WWII?

According to the WWII Museum, the cost of the war was $288,000,000,000.00 A nice round number.

What I don't know about it is if it includes costs from prior to December 1941, and after August, 1945, when Japan surrendered. I decided I'd just use from Jan 01, 1941 to Dec 31, 1945. That gives me 60 months (It's only 54 if you use whole months where the conflict was officially raging). Divide that $288bil by 60, you get $4,800,000,000.00, or $4.8bil per month, half the cost of Iraq.

Kewl.

Now go find an inflation calculator. I chose the one at Westegg. Load in the $4.8bil, set your years to 1945 and 2007 (last year the calculator has data for), and you get this number.

$56,017,361,958.99 or, $56Bil per month in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Check my math (not my strongest subject) and my methodology, please.

Just a sense of perspective when we talk about costs of the war and an indicator of level of committment to the war. Not a comment on the *value* of the war - and again, the gaping methodological flaw is that the 10 billion figure is the cost of the war - not counting Afstan and the regular operations of DoD, so it's still an apples/oranges comparison. But it's lunch time, and I don't have time to get much more in depth than that, and I thought it was an interesting start point.

Y'all can noodle it around.

And to reward you for reading all the way down here - go vist Lex. He has some Sea Service Pr0n.