I always respect your views on financial matters, CM, but I think you are forgetting one very important factor in your analysis.Even as costly and unfortunate as the Iraq War obviously was, it was responsible for a relatively small portion of the debt accumulation between 2001 and 2009.
What you are overlooking is the quality of expenditures made by the government when you look only at dollar numbers.
It was extremely poor judgment by Bush to spend over a trillion dollars of this country's treasure on an elected, unfunded and idiotic war to dig out WMDs that existed only in his misguided head.
That is spending the nation's treasure as foolishly as you possibly can.
On the other hand, when as a result of the mess made by the previous administration you find that the economy is rapidly going to hell in a hand basket, spending money to ramp up the economy is wise.
Now, I will be the first to admit that the stimulus money was not spent as judiciously as it should have, but when you suddenly find yourself with a badly injured patient then you have to administer messy triage right there on the field of battle where you find him before you lose him altogether.
Originally Posted by Fast Gunn
Look at it like this:
Most analysts assign a cost estimate of roughly $1 trillion to the Iraq War. A few years ago, I recall reading that the run rate of war-related spending was about $150 billion/year. If that was more or less true in 2008, then you can assume that the annual rate of spending (absent the Iraq War) might have "only" been $850 billion higher (than in 2000) instead of $1 trillion higher. Remember, the annual rate of spending increased by about $1 trillion during the Bush years.
The essential point is that even had the Iraq War not occurred, the period would still have been characterized by egregious fiscal irresponsibilty. The war simply made a very bad situation even worse.
And just as is the case today, little of the spending went for what you referred to as "quality expenditures", at least from the standpoint of the nation taken as a whole. Tom DeLay's congress porked up the budget to a then-unprecedented degree, to be exceeded only by Pelosi's a few years later. The capacity for massive pork dispensation and political patronage simply moved across the aisle to the other party, first in 2007 for congress, and then in 2009 for the White House.
As for the idea of spending money in order to "ramp up the economy", that's manifestly not what we've been doing. Starting with the mostly squandered $860 billion "stimulus" package of 2009, it's been all about politics, not economics. Congress paid off favored constituencies without regard for fixing the economic problems we face, or for creating jobs. This involved nothing more in the way of "quality expenditures" than those initiated by DeLay's congresses of the early-to-mid '00s.
That's why I've said that we're just kicking the can down the road and digging a deeper hole. I'm afraid we are building a bridge to the next crisis, not one to a more prosperous future.
One of the key points I continue to try to make is that we're doing nothing to address serious structural problems our economy faces. I discussed a couple of these issues in this thread, particularly in post nos. 13 and 21:
http://www.eccie.net/showthread.php?t=315363
