Sunday, October 23, 2011

Myths About The Iraq War

A recurring claim is that "if we hadn't spent all that money in Iraq, we wouldn't be in such deep financial trouble now."  As this August 30, 2010 Fox News report points out:

As President Obama prepares to tie a bow on U.S. combat operations in Iraq, Congressional Budget Office numbers show that the total cost of the eight-year war was less than the stimulus bill passed by the Democratic-led Congress in 2009.

According to CBO numbers in its Budget and Economic Outlook published this month, the cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom was $709 billion for military and related activities, including training of Iraqi forces and diplomatic operations.

The projected cost of the stimulus, which passed in February 2009, and is expected to have a shelf life of two years, was $862 billion. 
 Pretty clearly, if the cost of the Iraq War (over eight years) was what destroyed our economy--what did the stimulus bill do?

3 comments:

  1. Logically, that means the debt incurred from the Iraq War was the only thing keeping our economy going all this time!

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  2. In this day and age, I can't tell who "mollo" is (intentionally) mocking. To me, the snark sounds a lot like TARP II apologists going on about the jobs saved by the stimulus, ignoring the fact that unemployment rose faster than TARP II projections.

    The only thing the that the bailout and the Iraq War had in common was that they both involved federal expenditures. The former was supposed to fix stuff, and the latter was supposed to prevent some bad guys from breaking more stuff.

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  3. Alan, probably making fun of Paul Krugman's ludicrous commentary where he's become a parody of a Keynesian advocating wasteful spending, rueing a lack of wars, and proposing bizarre schemes of dumping more spending on the economy.

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