[NYTr] Cheering for Ron Paul - The Nation

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by tsimonds - activ-l

Truthdig via The Nation - Nov 21, 2007
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071203/truthdig


Cheering for Ron Paul

by Robert Scheer

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's 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
President Bush's father presided over the end of the cold war--even
though 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 Osama bin Laden, bringing democracy to Iraq
or preventing oil prices from tripling and enriching the ayatollahs of
Iran while messing up the American economy.

That money could have paid for a lot of things we could have used here
at home. As Rep. 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? Forty-six thousand dollars 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 [the insurgents]
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 a war that most
Democrats in Congress 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 in their calculations the long-term
care of wounded soldiers and the interest to be paid on the debt
financing the war. Of course, you need to account for the additional
debt run up by an administration that, instead of raising taxes to pay
for the war, cut them by relying on the Chinese Communists and other
foreigners who hold so much of our debt. As concluded by the JEC
report, compiled by the committee's professional staff, "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 has asked for an additional $196 billion in
supplementary aid for his wars, which is $60 billion more than the total
spent by the US 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.

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 supposed success of the surge might note that,
as the JEC report points out, "[m]aintaining post-surge troop levels in
Iraq over the next ten years would result in costs of $4.5 trillion."
Until the leading Democratic candidate faces up to the irreparable harm
that will be done to needed social programs over the next decades by the
red-ink spending she supported, I will be cheering for the libertarian
Republican. At least he won't throw more money down some foreign rat
hole.