The Soviets lost their Afghan War--and bankrupted their nation into financial collapse.
Is America making the same mistake?
Click here to calculate instantly how much you personally paid last year for our nation's wars in the Middle East. These wars cost us trillions, and what have we gained? Thousands of soldiers dead, hundreds of thousands severely injured with lost limbs and/or brain trauma from IEDs? Thousands more terrorist recruits that are angry at American because of the hundreds of thousands of civilians our bombs have killed? All for a few more years to guzzle non-renewable foreign energy? And is it worth the national deficit we have accrued? When we talk of "cutting waste" in our government, why are those that are the most excited about the cutting, the least willing to look at military waste (with the exception of libertarians)? When KBR and Halliburton get paid billions of our tax dollars for one redundant project after another (i.e., the brand new mess hall they were constructing across from the already-existing mess hall in the desert where my brother in the Army was packing up troops for the drawdown last year), why are those who seem most willing to wrap themselves in the American flag and demand cuts to Social Security, so unwilling to cut military contractor fraud? And why should we stay in these wars at all when they cost so much?
And before anyone goes labeling this a "liberal" post, let me point out that a) libertarians are fiscally conservative and against all overseas military aggression, and b) this is a post about fiscal responsibility and cutting waste, focusing on military waste. I welcome your comments.
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9 comments:
Couldn't agree with you more! We need to realize that nearly all military action is expensive, ineffective and usually counterproductive. However, the fact is that it hasn't cost us anything in dollars yet because it was all added to our National debt. The question is who is going to pay our debt. I would suggest that the people who supported and profited from the wars, like Haliburton, should pay for it.
Good idea! Let's send them a bill. The cost of doing business. We could give them a write off ; )
Two articles this morning on the lewrockwell.com website are, I believe, appropriate here.
The first explores the risks in the evolving situation in Libya and Syria.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts299.html
The second outlines some of the likely long-term implications of the current situation in Japan,
regardless of U.S. actions in the Middle East.
Both articles give a sense of the near to mid-term implications for the U.S. economy.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig12/bruno-g1.1.1.html
Ken
Thanks for the links, Ken!
Similar to what Steve says but probably off the point but its a good point...if the gov shuts down the reps and senators should forgo their salaries.
Anon--Amen. I just saw a segment on this on CNN--I cannot believe that our legislators will be getting paid while our troops and their families do without. My brother is in the Army and has a wife and six children. How can they justify pulling the plug on troops' families while collecting a check themselves...all in the name of the need to make budget cuts?!
Anyone who thinks that shutting down the federal gov't for a few days will say money is being fooled.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/The-price-of-a-government-cnnm-3294374261.html?x=0
As with most of the rhetoric coming out of DC, it's all a scam.
here is where most of our military spending is going:
http://www.kbr.com/About/
forgot to say that these are the contractors (KBR) that were building the brand new mess hall across from the already existing mess hall in the desert in Iraq as my brother in the Army was there helping troops pack for the DRAWDOWN.
they are also the same ones that came to his base outside Sadr City and ripped out all the perfectly functioning wiring and lighting fixtures in their entire building and installed all brand new stuff to the tune of millions of taxpayer dollars.
if the Tea Party wants people to believe that they are serious about cutting spending and waste, they have got to get over their knee-jerk aversion to cutting any military spending and start scrutinizing KBR and other "defense" contractors that we blow hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on annually.
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