Do you have $1.27 trillion to donate to help pay it off? I think a debt of $13.61 trillion sounds somewhat better than 14.88 trillion anyway. What was it all worth? nearly 10,000 of our own dead not to count allies and Iraqi citizens and several more thousand permanently injured? All for what?
Does it factor in rebuilding costs? Training costs of the new Iraqi armies, Halliburton inflated costs for everything else over there etc?
Quoting Dreadnought (Reply 9):
The war is less than 10% of or debt problem. 90+% is overspending right here in the US. |
I'd rather see the spending done in this country than someone else's country. There is a chance we might get some of that money back that way.
The direct costs of war may only be 10% of our debt problem, but there are such things as indirect and the multiplier effect - what kind of costs do these wars have on our economy that may not be directly related?
ie travel went down out of people's fear of flying during the war. The gas prices have been high mainly due to our involvement in these wars (that was when prices started going up above $2 a gallon shortly after these wars started), which lead to people buying less vehicles, which lead to auto bailouts. Also due to high gas prices, a lot of companies had to lay off workers (ie the airlines being affected by high gas prices), which means higher unemployment - meaning the government is paying out more unemployment benefits.
I have a pretty good feeling if the U.S. was not involved in these wars that we would have seen or needed to see the $1 trillion bank bailouts.
Also, you need to factor in the money that we are borrowing from China to fund these wars comes with interest when we have to pay it back.
