bin Laden dead. Five days. The $ cost is HUGE

Joseph Stiglitz gave us a $3 trillion figure, which he recently stated is lower than the real price we have paid, once we factor in the opportunity costs.

Ezra Klein revisits this theme, and notes that OBL was successful, even if he didn't win it:

[OBL] had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do — and, more to the point, what he thought he could do — was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

Now, OBL is gone, and it is high time we started to seriously rethink the war machinery that has ruled America. 

The National Journal provides the following chart to put things in perspective:

And adds:

More than actual security, we bought a sense of action in the face of what felt like an existential threat. We staved off another attack on domestic soil. Our debt load was creeping up already, thanks to the early waves stages of baby-boomer retirements, but we also hastened a fiscal mess that has begun, in time, to fulfill bin Laden’s vision of a bankrupt America. If left unchecked, our current rate of deficit spending would add $9 trillion to the national debt over the next decade. That’s three Osamas, right there.
Although Bin Laden is buried in the sea, other Islamist extremists are already vying to take his place. In time, new enemies, foreign and domestic, will rise to challenge America. What they will cost us, far more than we realize, is our choice. 

What, me worry?