Posted by
rycK on Tuesday, March 04, 2008 7:32:41 AM
Moaning About Spending, War and Other Maudlin Laments: Raise Taxes, Of Course.
We can depend on the New York Times to moan over money spent on things other than rescuing their fraction of our society. Bob Herbert details all the debt we will incur in useless war attains terrorism when some bribes, described in diplomatic terms might have been less costly. In his article entitled The $2 Trillion Nightmare[1] By Bob Herbert, we are treated to a long list of perceived financial misadventures over the war. The taxes were chucked into the wrong holes.
“The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more.”
We spent the equivalent of 17 trillion dollars, a full year’s GDP, on the Second World War and lost 400,000 dead and a million wounded. How does that compare to Iraq? Hitler had no reasonable nuclear weapons program and neither did Tojo, but several Arab states are willing to work with both the shrunken remains of the old USSR and North Korea and buy them with oil revenues.
“Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
What did WW1 cost us with 160,000 dead? The Democrats were offered a chance to ‘fix’ this Ponzi Scheme from the socialist FDR at the beginning of the Bush administration and they rejected it. The tax revenues and restructuring programs were offered, but they demurred. “We have plenty of time quote the Democrats.” Their plan was to just let it rot during a Republican term and then bawl, as they are now about Iraq.
““Imagine then,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “what a war — that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years — will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.””
It is a truism that the 400,000 dead in WW2 did not need any V. A. benefits. Imagine what costs we incurred from narcotics abuse in the US. How do much do we spend on AIDS ‘research’ on people who select an elective disease. How much have we sent on heroin rehab programs, STD education or the ‘rehabilitation’ of criminals. How much does it cost us to coddle 2 million criminals in our prisons??
Do we really spend 600,000,000 on welfare every year? How much is that summed over 50 years? Is that more than 2 trillion??
“Some former presidents — Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower — were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century. That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of S.N.L.”
We can only wonder what this feverish comment might mean. We can chuck accountability and shared sacrifice after 911? Would it have been less expensive to grow a field of roses after Pearl Harbor and just thanked the Japanese for showing the weaknesses in our Pacific military strategy?
The trillion dollars that was in the Social Security ‘trust’ fund was spent. How much do we have to raise taxes to get that back and reinserted into the SS system? Oh, more than 1 trillion given the inefficiency in our government spending? How about 2 trillion dollars?
Wilson lost 160,000 troops in a war that we had no interest in. FDR allowed his Marxist advisors snarl up the map in Europe and Asia in favor of the Communists and we kept 300,000 troops in Germany for 50 years and 40,000 are still there. For what? How much did it cost to support 40,000 troops in South Korea for 50 years? Or, the 30,000 in Japan for 60 years? Can we get a cost accounting for these expenditures and then call that debt?? How many bridges could we have built with that money?
What was Truman doing in Korea fighting his allies in the far left world? How did we manage to hand over most of Europe to the Communists and then fight the Cold War and produce 60,000 nuclear war heads and 400 ships and 200 nuclear submarines with tens of thousands of cruise missiles?
How much money have we chucked into the social latrines in Africa, Mexico and South America to ‘fix’ some social programs? How much money did we give North Korea to conduct research on their nuclear weapons so they could share these findings with Syria??
How is it that we have doubled spending on ‘education’ since 1960 and the test scores do not improve? Why is the most expensive educational system in the US [Washington, DC with $18,000 per student] also the worst school system in America? Should we spend more?
Most of this stuff was spending by liberal Democrats. Then, we might ask what Europe has done for us since the Marshall Plan that gave the few remaining people able to assemble more than two clichés in a reasonable order in the midst of 31,000,000 dead bodies and bombed out cities?? They offer a lot of advice about ‘peace,’ which is feasible only after 51,000,000 of their citizens and most of the soldiers were killed. Do they want some more of our foreign aid? What is the ‘cost’ of that expenditure?
What if we had just banked all the money we spent, by liberals, on WW1, WW2, Korea, VN, and foreign aid and let that interest build and fund Social Security?? Would we as citizens be paying anything at all per month for those benefits?
It is a vainglorious essay to reflect on certain spending programs in our history going back to Washington and ‘calculate’ the costs to society. This notion is so sophomoric that it only rates three honks on my kazoo.
I worked out the math and see A $20 Trillion Leftist Nightmare.
Let us raise taxes!!
rycK