Politics > Politics-USA > What can you get for a trillion bucks? Or make that $1.6 trillion. Or maybe $3.5 trillion
| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Harry Hope" |
| Date: |
23 Nov 2007 07:40:06 AM |
| Object: |
What can you get for a trillion bucks? Or make that $1.6 trillion. Or maybe $3.5 trillion |
From The San Francisco Gate, 11/21/07:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/11/21/EDGPTG3AR.DTL&feed=rss.opinion
The surge in Bush war spending
Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate, Inc.
What can you get for a trillion bucks?
Or make that $1.6 trillion, if you take the cost of the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars as tallied by the majority staff of Congress' Joint
Economic Committee (JEC).
Or is it the $3.5 trillion figure cited by Ron Paul, whose concern
about the true cost of this war for ordinary Americans shames the
leading Democrats, who prattle on about needed domestic programs that
will never find funding because of future war-related government debt.
Given that the overall defense budget is now double what it was when
Bush's father presided over the end of the Cold War, at a time when we
don't have a militarily sophisticated enemy in sight, you have to
wonder how this president has managed to exceed Cold War spending
levels.
What has he gotten for the trillions wasted?
Nothing, when it comes to capturing bin Laden, bringing democracy to
Iraq, or preventing oil prices from tripling and enriching the
ayatollahs of Iran while messing up the American economy.
But that money could have paid for a lot of things we could have used
here at home.
As Paul points out, for what the Iraq war costs, we could present each
family of four a check for $46,000 - which exceeds the $43,000 median
household income in his Texas district.
He asks:
"What about the impact of those costs on education, the very thing
that so often helps to increase earnings? $46,000 would cover 90
percent of the tuition costs to attend a four-year public university
in Texas for both children in that family of four. But, instead of
sending kids to college, too often we're sending them to Iraq, where
the best news in a long time is they aren't killing our men and women
as fast as they were last month."
How damning that it takes a libertarian Republican to remind the
leading Democratic candidates of the opportunity costs of the Iraq war
that most Democrats in Congress had voted for.
But they don't need to take Paul's word for it;
last week, the majority staff of the Joint Economic Committee in
Congress came up with similarly startling estimates of the long-term
costs of this war.
The White House has quibbled over the methods employed by the JEC to
calculate the real costs of our two foreign wars, because the
Democrats in the majority dared to include the long-term care of
wounded soldiers and the interest to be paid on the debt financing the
war in their calculations.
Of course, you need to account for the additional debt run up by an
administration that cut taxes, instead of raising them to pay for the
war, by relying on the Chinese communists and other foreigners who
hold so much of our debt.
As the JEC report, compiled by the committee's professional staff,
concluded, "almost 10 percent of total federal government interest
payments in 2008 will consist of payments on the Iraq debt accumulated
so far."
However, even if you take the hard figure of the $804 billion the
administration demanded for the past five years, and ignore all the
long-run costs like debt service, we're still not talking chump change
here.
For example, Bush just asked for an additional $191 billion in
supplementary aid for his wars, which is $55 billion more than the
total spent by the U.S. government last year on all of America's
infrastructure repairs, the National Institutes of Health, college
tuition assistance and the SCHIP program to provide health insurance
to kids who don't have any.
In fact, on this matter of covering the uninsured, it should be
pointed out, to those who say we (alone among industrialized nations)
can't afford it, that we could have covered all 47 million uninsured
Americans over the past six years for what the Iraq war cost us.
How come that choice - war in Iraq or full medical coverage for all
Americans - was never presented to the American people by the
Democrats and Republicans who voted for this war and continue to
finance it?
Those now celebrating the success of the surge might note that, as the
JEC report points out, "maintaining post-surge troop levels in Iraq
over the next 10 years would result in costs of $4.5 trillion."
_______________________________________________________
Harry
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