Two Big Picture Books on Fiscal Policy A two-week congressional recess affords us the opportunity to take a big picture look at some big fiscal policy problems. And two recently published big picture books reviewed yesterday in the Washington Post and the New York Times seek to sharpen the focus on different aspects of that picture, though apparently with differing degrees of success. "Where Does the Money Go?: Your Guided Tour to the Federal Budget Crisis" by Scott Bittle and Jean Johnson (Collins, $16.95 in paperback) draws a rave from the Times (A Proposed Diet for the U.S. Budget): This is a book that manages to be entertaining and irreverent while serving as an informative primer on a subject that is crucial to the future of all Americans [concluding in] words are neither politically partisan nor alarmist [that] our country may one day be unable to make even the interest payments on our $9 trillion debt, payments that are now $226.6 billion a year — and we would be forced to declare ourselves a bankrupt nation. "The Three Trillion Dollar War --The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict" by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes (Norton, 311 pp. $22.95) does not fare as well (What's the Tab?). The reviewer echoes the skepticism we express below in a blog about the authors' op-ed synopsis of their book, finding that Stiglitz and Bilmes try to argue that the costs of the war far exceed the $500 billion or so officially spent on it thus far: Yet by making many assumptions about the future course of the conflict -- from its duration (through at least 2017, they predict) to its impact on global oil prices ($5 to $10 extra per barrel, for seven to eight years) -- the authors will leave many readers unconvinced... A trillion here, a trillion there -- pretty soon the line between "estimate" and "guess" gets a bit blurry [concluding that t]he book's title suggests a level of precision that is not borne out in its pages.