NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and anti terrorist efforts abroad could cost the country $2.4 trillion over the next ten years, according to a report Wednesday.
The money, over 70 percent of which would go to support operations in Iraq, includes the estimated $600 billion spent since 2001, Congressional Budget Office Director Peter Orszag said in testimony before the House Budget Committee. That estimate includes projected interest, since the government is borrowing most of the funds required.
The $2.4 trillion would pay to keep 75,000 troops deployed overseas from 2013 to 2017. About 210,000 troops are currently deployed. It does not include the Pentagon's normal spending, which in 2007 is estimated to be about $450 billion.
The estimated $2.4 trillion works out to about $21,500 per American household.
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OWWWWCCCHH!! Ow! Ow! Owwww!!! OWWWCCHH!!
This, from the fiscal conservatives???
Tell, you what: I pass.
No thanks, I'll keep my $21 k. Let's let the 30% (?) who support the war pay $63,000 per household (or however that math works out) and the rest of us will pass. Referendum time?
15 comments:
Since it's obvious that this war is going to go on forever (or at least nearly forever), I wonder when the administration going to start including it in the actual budget, rather than always asking for emergency money like this. That would seem to be the fiscally responsible thing to do.
Heh. I crack myself up. LOL
Dan:"This, from the fiscal conservatives???"
What fiscal conservatives would that be? Looking around. Don't see any.
Careful, Dan, that you don't fall into the old "If we had some ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs."
Remember, just because "money" isn't being spent on the military, it doesn't mean that it's available to be spent on anything else.
E, I think you know I agree with you much of the time (or at least partially agree with you). I like hearing what you have to say, even when I disagree with you.
But I have a hard time wrapping my mind around this.
If we have 1 million homeless, jobless individuals and families, then that has a cost to our society. In your opinion, is this correct?
And, if we can assist them (even if we have to pay people to assist them) so that they work and make a living, then we have reduced their cost to society.
In your opinion, is this correct?
I imagine you understand that this is reasonable to most folk, but then that might be because we buy into the notion of money as an exchange medium, or some such.
You know, I'd like to post a series of questions to you about jobs and their moral efficacy and legitimacy. We know that you think farming/raising one's own food is a legitimate job. Is it also a legitimate job if you WORK for a farmer who is growing food? What if you provide water for a farmer who is growing food...
These types of questions. You game for that sometime, as a post of its own?
Dan, the general principle that, assuming we are unwilling to knock them in the head and shove them off into a ditch, we can save a great deal of money and resources by intervening in certain situations. Children's health and dental care is one area. You can examine children and put seals in their molars for very little, but treating infected teeth later on the public dime is infinitely more expensive.
The "war on drugs" is another example. It doesn't work, is counter productive in fact, while treatment and management cost very little (by comparison in money and rights) and work better.
You will find that that the only serious objection that non-liberals have to the scheme is the practice of flinging about baskets of money hoping some of it might land on the right person and do some good.
But that's not the point of your post. Your posit, is it not, is that we are spending (going into debt) to the tune of $20K+ per person to finance the war and could we not use that money to better purpose?
Maybe not. I'd say a flat 'no'. Because the money isn't real. It is being created to finance the war. If there were no war, the money wouldn't exist at all.
You see, you can create more war any time you like. The materials and technology to wag war are abundant so if you'd like, say, a 33% increase in war spending, you could just bomb Iran. The amount of war you are buying for a dollar wouldn't change much.
Not so with real commodities for real people. Just because you declare that more money exists, it doesn't follow that more food springs from the ground, more houses suddenly materialize, or more people are trained to deliver medical services (as examples). Those things take time. They aren't instant as war usually is.
If a lot of "money" appears suddenly in order to purchase a finite product, the only thing that happens is the price of that product goes up ... NOT that there is suddenly a lot more of what you want to purchase.
$180 per month.
VERY astute observations E. And right on the money.
Is there any such thing as a fiscal conservative anymore? I think that you're speaking to the crickets.
Just so long as we don't confuse the so-called "conservatives" in office for fiscal conservatives or as being fiscally responsible.
Dan,
From one "fiscal conservative" who is in the trenches full time to provide decent affordable housing to "the least of these". I say keep the Federal government out. Unfortunately we do have to work with local and state governments (it's unaviodable). The reason why private non-profit/ministries do a better job with housing (in particular), is that we don't give things away. Further, 100% of our donors are voluntary.
If you want to "solve homelesness" you have to deal with at least 3 different groups of people with different needs.
1. Those who are homeless because of mental illness and disease. (I don't have a good answer, but it see,s like mercy should be the guiding principle. The govt may in fact have a role here)
2. Those who are homeless because they want to be. I have an ex-employee and freind who lived in a "colony" under a bridge because he wanted to. Short of forced roundups I'm at a loss.
3. Those who are homeless do to other factors. These could be divorce, loss of job, drug/alchohol dependency, bad mortagage. In my experience, what seems to work well is to provide work, support,expectations, accountability, respect, and freindship. In short treat them like a person, not like a statistic or the target of a program. Over the past decade I have had the opportunity of employ and befriend some great guys, they all had 2 things in common, they were homeless, and of a different ethnic group. Almost all of them are self sufficient and (more importantly) clean. It's not perfect, but it's better than passing out money with no strings.
Q: What's the first thing you see in most homes recieving Section 8 $$.
A: A really big flat screen TV.
Sorry to unload, but you touched on an issue that is very personal to me. Feel free to ignore or delete if you want.
Craig, thanks for the thoughts and you're welcome to Payne Hollow anytime.
I don't disagree with much of what you've said. My preference for dealing with most problems/issues is nearly always:
1. Local, private solutions
2. Private solutions from other-than-local sources (with caveats)
3. Local, community/gov't solutions
4. State gov't solutions
5. Federal gov't solutions
Clearly, the more a person is known by someone working with them in their interests, the more tailored assistance can be.
And at any time that churches/private donors wanted to step up to deal with homelessness (for instance) to the extent they can (acknowledging that some few wish to remain homeless), the church/private donors could do so and put the local, state and federal gov't out of the homeless problem altogether.
Short of private enterprise doing so, though, it remains in our own best interest to try to effectively deal with these problems. In other words, it costs us as a society more to deal with the negative effects of homelessness than it does to implement programs - even less than ideal programs. Seems to me.
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As to your "most homes" of welfare recipients having big screen tvs, you have stats on that or is that just anectdotal? My wife is a church social worker and we certainly see some (I don't know about "most") welfare folk making poor choices such as that.
But then, that's part of why they are poor, right?
Dan,
First I said section 8 recipients. Second, I don't know if it qualifies as a stat, but haveing inspected a significant (@100) number of these properties it is certainly a trend. But, in the interest of precision, it is anectdotal.
There is a more serious point though. Simply put, where else in the world can one be called poor while living in a house with electricity and plumbing. Owning a car, or at least having access to reliable public transportation. As bad as it is being poor here is light years ahead of being poor in the rest of the world.
So you are right, a big componant of poverty in the US is poor descision making. Unfortunalely we probably can't legislate against that.
I came here from Gagdad Bob’s link to the Weblog awards, so forgive me if I seem forward for making a comment. But Dan’s comment about the costs of the wars and antiterrorist efforts abroad and how that money could have been spend here caught my attention.
The question isn’t whether you think we should spend that money here or save it by cutting Federal spending by $2.4 trillion over ten years. The question is really about support for the wars we are in. And from this blog entry, Dan, I take it you do not support them.
I believe we did something good to liberate the Afghanis from Taliban rule and even more so to liberate Iraqis from the butcher Saddam and his sons. This is a component of my support for these two wars.
But as much as I would like to see tyrannies toppled everywhere, that is not why we undertook these wars. We went to war because we are in a much larger conflict. It is an existential conflict that pits the West against Islam-based fascist terrorists who have a messianic belief that the failings of Islamic countries are a result of impure beliefs, and that their pure faith as evidenced by their willingness to wage an asymmetrical war against the West will restore them to their former glory. It is existential because those waging war against us are utterly amoral and given the time and resources which they could martial should we ignore them, they would wreak even more death and carnage than they have since 1979. This is not an ‘over there war,’ if you had any doubt after Sept 11. It’s not optional. They brought the war to us. The least we can do is return the attention.
Thanks for visiting djadja and welcome to Payne Hollow. And you would be correct in assuming that I am amongst a huge number of folk here in the US and around the globe that do not support this Iraq invasion. That think it was morally wrong and legally questionable and not effective, to boot.
You state:
We went to war because we are in a much larger conflict. It is an existential conflict that pits the West against Islam-based fascist terrorists...
Let's assume you are correct. Right now, there are ~1 billion Muslims in the world, the vast majority of which do not actively support terroristic means. And you would be correct to state that there are some relative few who would like to conquer the world for Islam - killing infidels if necessary. Even fewer who think that and are actively willing to act on that belief system.
So, the problem that the great number of us have with Bush's approach to invading Iraq is that it has given some credibility and support to an otherwise marginalized group of thugs.
We need to isolate and marginalize them, treat them as the criminals they are rather than give them the legitimacy of honorable opponents who bravely stand up to the Great Satan. Bush is playing into their hands, increasing support for them and thus, Bush's policy is more dangerous than the mere thugs who would kill innocent people because Bush is validating them rather than marginalizing them.
At least that's how it seems to a vast number of us out here.
You and I share concern about how to deal with the horrible actions of terrorists, but I reject questionably legal, moral and wise approaches to dealing with it. I'd hope you could agree that we need to not blindly follow a leader just because he says he's "going to get 'em terr'rists!" but rather seek efficient and moral ways to deal with them.
Hi Dan,
Thanks for the reasoned discourse.
You would be right in thinking that I would agree we need to not blindly follow a leader “just because he says he's "going to get 'em terr'rists!" but rather “seek efficient and moral ways to deal with them.”
Even if I accept that characterization of Bush (one he contributed to), that was not why I supported the war initially. It had to do with knowing what kind of hell on earth Saddam had created and having the same reaction I had to the Nazi death camps: I thought this was a supreme evil that should be ended, in this case before it could be handed off to his sons. It was not an evil that would end in and of itself. For this reason I feel the war in Iraq is a just war.
You state that the vast majority of Muslims do not actively support terrorism. If you have ever lived in a high-crime neighborhood, you know that the vast majority of your neighbors are not criminals and are in fact fellow victims of those criminals. So it obviously does not take a majority to have an effect. And when the thugs have hijacked, made common cause with, or are the governing authorities, they are no longer marginalized.
I think Al-Qaeda has done the job of making it clear to most Iraqis and a growing number of former admirers that they are not honorable opponents — and I think I can safely assume you do not think that either. How then do you deal with them morally if you mean something other than how we have done?
Djadja Rob
Sorry, I just saw this comment.
Here's one source for what we should be doing instead.
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