THE COST OF WAR IN IRAQ TO NORMAL CITIZENRY

Some academic economists are beginning to to gauge what the sums spent on Iraq could have financed,a down payment on a Social Security fix,for instance.Nobel layreate Joseph Stiglitz predicts Iraq will cost at least 1$ trillion,assuming troops are withdrawn by 2010."Half that sum would have put Social Security ona firm grounding for the next 75 years,"he wrote last year in a paper."If we spent even a small fraction of the remainder on education and research,it is likely our economy would be in far stronger position."It`s running about $100 billion a year that excluding our defense spending today,or about 1% of GDP.By the time it was over,Vietnam cost the equivalent of about $660 billion in today`s dollars.