Ah, memories. Not always pleasant, my friends.

From 2003:

The White House is downplaying published reports of an estimated $50 billion to $60 billion price tag for a war with Iraq, saying it is “impossible” to estimate the cost at this time.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels told The New York Times in an interview published Tuesday that such a conflict could cost $50 billion to $60 billion — the price tag of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

But Trent Duffy, an OMB spokesman, said Daniels did not intend to imply in the Times interview that $50 billion to $60 billion was a hard White House estimate. […]

In September, Daniels disputed an estimate by Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey — who has since left the White House — that war with Iraq could cost $200 billion.

Daniels said he believes Lindsey’s estimate was “the upper end of a hypothetical,” Duffy said.

Congressional Democrats this past fall estimated the cost of a military attack against Iraq around $93 billion.

From 2005 predictions were a little less rosy:

Yet the costs for Pentagon operations are likely to pile up in years ahead. By 2010, war expenses might total $600 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Much depends on when — and how many — U.S. military personnel can be withdrawn from the Iraqi theater of operations.

These days, most estimates seem to agree that the expenses of fighting the war in Iraq, if they haven’t already hit $600 BILLION, they soon will. And that doesn’t include the long term costs of the war to our nation which some calculate will run into the TRILLIONS:

Last September in a phone interview, Ms. Bilmes estimated the war’s total price tag as easily exceeding $2 trillion. In a book published last month, she and Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist from Columbia University, New York, estimated the total long-run cost at $3 trillion in 2007 valued dollars. If you add in Afghanistan and various costs to the economy, the sum reaches $4.95 trillion.

Useful information to remember when you hear this or that figure will solve the economic crisis. Because,, as we’ve found out the hard way over the last five years, the experts our government relies upon don’t exactly have a great track record on estimating the cost of such things.