A new round of defense and emergency appropriations will raise the total amount of money spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to nearly $750 billion by the end of FY 2008, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Later in March, Congress will begin consideration of President Bush's FY 07 request for an additional $93.4 billion in emergency war funding. $70 billion in war funding has already been appropriated for FY 07, bringing the likely total for incremental war expenditures (or additional funds needed for the wars, including reconstruction) to $163.4 billion for the current fiscal year. The Bush administration requested $141.7 billion in war spending for FY 08 and projected $50 billion for FY 09. The CBO calculates that these requests will bring the total amount appropriated for the military campaigns to $746 billion. But costs will most likely exceed the FY 08 request, as the rate of spending in Iraq has accelerated each year of the war, mostly due to increasing equipment maintenance and repair costs. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that total spending for the Iraq war alone will reach $456 billion by the end of FY 07 and that the Iraq campaign has received about seventy to eighty percent of all spending on the two wars. These figures from the CRS are only estimates because the Department of Defense has not released data on the disaggregated costs of each recent military operation. Indeed, there is no consensus among budget-monitoring government agencies as to how much money in total has been spent on the wars. The Department of Defense does not track budget outlays. Taken as a whole, the wars are on track to rank among the most expensive in U.S. history. The Vietnam War, which lasted more than 10 years, cost $660 billion in today's dollars. The estimated rate of spending per month in Iraq is significantly higher than it was during Vietnam — $8.0 billion and $5.1 billion per month respectively, in today's dollars. Spending for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, however, will take up a much smaller percentage of annual gross domestic product (GDP). Current war spending accounts for about one percent of GDP, whereas during the Vietnam war, spending took up nearly nine percent. Calculations of incremental costs exclude potential future costs, such as medical care for wounded veterans. A recent study by Joseph Stiglitz, who is an economics Nobel Prize winner and teaches at Columbia University, and Linda Bilmes, who teaches at Harvard, showed that total future costs for the Iraq war could exceed $2 trillion, largely because of expensive long-term costs for veteran health care. These cost calculations and projections also exclude interest payments on the loans that have been used to finance the wars. Almost all war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan has occurred at the same time that taxes have been severely cut, causing the federal government to run substantial deficits and continue to incur larger and larger interest charges on the national debt. In its report, the CBO also projected total incremental (excluding health care, etc.) costs of the war over the next decade. Under a model where troop levels gradually decline over six years, CBO estimates that another $764 billion will need to be appropriated through 2017, for a total of $1.5 trillion. If troop levels decrease faster, CBO predicts another $317 billion will be necessary, for a total of about $1.1 trillion in combined war expenditures. Spending on the Iraq war in particular is far more than what the White House told the American people the costs would be. Around the time war was initiated, the Bush administration estimated that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion. In fact, former OMB Director Mitch Daniels said at the time that the estimate was very high.