Check out Rep. David Obey’s long series of criticisms of the Afghanistan war. It’s long and worth reading. Obey is the chief appropriator in the House. Money for the Afghanistan war runs through him. And this is the sort of speech that would make any administration freak out about the money.

In the course of Obey’s remarks, he makes this meta-point about national priorities:

As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it? We are now in the middle of a fundamental debate over reforming our healthcare system. The President has indicated that it must cost less than $900 billion over ten years and be fully paid for. The Congressional Budget Office has had four committees twisting themselves into knots in order to fit healthcare reform into that limit. CBO is earnestly measuring the cost of each competing healthcare plan. Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan? If we add 40,000 troops and recognize the need for a sustained 10 year or longer commitment, as the architects of this plan tell us we do, the military costs alone would be over $800 billion. And unlike the demands that are being made of the healthcare alternatives that they be deficit neutral, we’ve heard no such demand with respect to Afghanistan. I would ask how much will this entire effort cost, when you add in civilian costs and costs in Pakistan? And how would that impact the budget?

My friend Matthew Yglesias likes to note that for some reason, Washington doesn’t "count" money for defense like it counts every other expenditure. A good case in point comes from Anthony Cordesman of CSIS, who writes:

The US does badly need to debate overall federal spending priorities, and how these impact the US economy, but it is not a debate that should focus on Afghanistan. It is a debate over national priorities which should examine all aspects of how federal spending and our economy are structured and shifting, not the marginal costs of a war.

Eight years of war in Afghanistan have cost $228 billion. That is not a marginal cost. I do not believe that a budgetary argument for anything is an argument-ender. If something’s a true national priority, you find a way to finance it. But for way too much defense policy, and particularly about wars, the budgetary considerations never quite seem to ever penetrate the public consciousness, with lawmakers and pundits acting instead like Loso & The-Dream.