Your cumulative bill for the Iraq war: $1,020

Yesterday President Bush signed bills that fund $162 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That brings the total bill to about $650 billion for the Iraq war and roughly $200 billion for Afghanistan. How do you figure out what your financial share of the $850 billion war tab is?

Your share of the bill is impossible to calculate on a general basis, but let's try with some 2006 Census Bureau numbers. If you calculate by the number of individual Americans over 25 (195 million), you get a bill of $4,360. Only 152 million are in the workforce, so that makes the bill $5,592. If we go by households (112 million) it's $7,590.

Where it gets really complicated is that if you make more money, you pay more taxes -- and a higher percent of the taxes you pay go to the federal government, not social security. The Congressional Budget Office divided the population into fifths by their income. The highest fifth (or quintile) made an average $231,000 pre-tax in 2005. They paid 86% of federal income taxes. (This calculation leaves out not only Social Security, but also corporate and excise taxes.) That means the top 20% (or 28 million households) paid 86% of the $850 billion or $731 billion. So the average Iraq and Afghanistan wars bill for those in the top 20% is now $26,100. The top 1%, who make an average $1.6 million pre-tax, pay 39% of income taxes, so their cumulative bill would be $30,136.