This is the cumulative cost of the Iraq War to date. About $621 billion.

According to the OMB, in 2009, a single fiscal year, we will spend $632 billion on Medicare and Medicaid/SCHIP alone.

This doesn't include any Federal discretionary funding for anything medical, veteran care, or any state or local spending in this area. Nor does it include ANY other social spending at Federal, state, or local levels.

In 2010, that number will be $661 billion. By 2013, assuming no changes, it will be almost $800 billion.

If we had never fought the Iraq War the savings would have bought you ONE F***ING YEAR of your glorious government medical care.

And that's under the current government medical system. If government was paying everyone's medical bills, the dearest wish of supposedly deficit-concerned liberals, the cost of the war would be lost in the noise.

In 2009, Social Security alone will cost the Federal government ANOTHER $644 billion, again with one year's budget exceeding the total Iraq War cost to date.

If you have trouble with the math, the combination of these entitlements adds up to $1.276 trillion. For just 2009.

Joseph Stiglitz has been desperately inflating the predicted total eventual cost of the war by inserting every remotely plausible externality into his figures, he originally came up with $1 trillion, but at last count I think he has managed to shove it up to $3 trillion. Just between now and when Obama runs for re-election, entitlements will have used up $5.5 trillion, almost twice that amount.

Listen very carefully: The war is not our primary budget/deficit/debt problem. Entitlements are. Any economist would tell you so.

How many times have I told you the above? Short of being able to construct a method of collimating and modulating neutrinos into an information beam actually capable of penetrating your mind, I have no idea how to get this information to actually register.