Megan McArdle, writing at Instapundit, takes on the following argument made by Osama in his latest tape:

...al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost - according to the lowest estimate - more than $500 billion.

Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan - with Allah's permission.

McArdle comments,

Iraq and Afghanistan together have cost us less than $300 billion, including the money Bush is going to ask for next year. In the same period, the US economy will have grossed about 36 trillion dollars, meaning that the war will have cost us less than 1% of our income.

If Osama really wants to gut the US budget, he's going to need to try something more drastic, like opening up a chain of Medicare clinics.

Burn.

However, Osama Bin Laden is not the only one making the connection between war and deficits. A certain "George W. Bush" explaining why he reneged on a campaign pledge to balance the budget cited the costs of the war as a major rationale,

I remember when I was campaigning, I said, would you ever deficit spend? And I said, yes, only if there were a time of war, or recession, or a national emergency.Never thought we'd get -- And so we have a temporary deficit in our budget, because we are at war, we're recovering, our economy is recovering, and we've had a national emergency.