Uh, no. The 87 billion was 66 billion to pay for the military occupation, and 20 billion for reconstruction money. This amount covered both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Shit. $86 billion. I’m speechless.
Goooooooooood speechwriters! My favorite was his sentence that went something like “we have found huge caches of weapons, and massive amounts of ammo”. Nothing subliminal there :rolleyes:
I heard $66 billion…but then, I’m a CPA, so that’s just a rounding difference. Heh.
No doubt. I wonder how many people are going to say at work tomorrow “They found WMDs! The president said so last night!”
Probably enough to make me cry.
I flipped past Fox and saw Sean Hannity say he was “statesmanlike”, or something. Snippets I saw he looked like he was shitting his pants.
Only 20 billion for reconstruction? Ye Gods! Despite my carping on the deficit, that figure is WAY low. Barely 2 billion a month. Bremer, I hereby predict, will not last. He’ll resign out of frustration.
Sooner or later the Prez is going to have to learn the true meaning of the phrase, “In for a dime, in for a dollar.”
$86 billion = $US goes through the floor, US goods are cheaper, economy picks up around spring-summer next year based on exports, Bush gets re-elected on the back of a ‘strong’ economy.
Hey ho, at least the US is going to be a cheap holiday destination for a while!
Let’s keep it in perspective. $86 billion is about 4% of the federal budget, and about .08% of GDP.
Yes, it’s damned expensive, but it’s not going to destroy the economy. It’s about what the Department of Education spends, and I’m not sure that has benefitted anyone, ever.
Yeah, but it gets tacked onto everything else. On the talk shows this morning, all the chatter was about having a larger military in general. So the bill just keeps getting larger.
And I really don’t think throwing 21 billion at it is nearly enough to reconstruct Iraq. Bremer was talking “tens of billions”, and the breakout he gave was intimidating, to say the least. No one’s picked up on it that I can see, but the man’s been pestering DC for resources since he got there. I’ve got a feeling he realized almost immediately what kind of a mess he walked into.
As for other countries giving, not without real concessions. Hopefully Powell has a mandate to give in order to get at the UN. That would get us substantially on the way towards a true exit strategy.
There was a weapons of mass destruction reference–that Sadam had in fact already used them. It was sort of a throw away line. I can only think that this was a reference to the gassing of the Kurdish village in, I think, 1988 or there abouts and which some members here have questioned as Iranian, not Iraqi, action.
Otherwise it was pretty much the pedestrian show that some expected, except of the amount the thing is going to cost–eighty six billion dollars ($86,000,000,000.00), eighty six thousand million dollars for our British friends. That’s per year. Maybe, if we are lucky, for five or six years. Apparently that is on top of the four billion dollars a month, forty eight billion a year, we have been talking about up until now. That is real money. That is enough money that we will need another tax cut to stimulate revenue growth.
I had wishfully hoped for one of two announcements. First I had daydreamed that the President would have taken our friend Brutus’s altogether real politic view of the problem and said:
“Screw terrorism. We are always going to have the odd bomb thrower. Can’t do much about it. But, damn it, my fellow countrymen, Iraq has oil. Do you have any idea how much we can do with all that oil? Oil, oil, oil! Baahaahaahaa!”
Second I had mused that the President would announce the resignation of Secretary Rumsfelt “for personal reasons,” he wanting to spend more time with the grandkids and all, his replacement by Colin Powell, and that the State Department was going to be taken over by
Wait for it
William Jefferson Clinton,
because it was time for George W. Bush, just like the UN, to set aside old differences and work for the common good.
“The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitive. In the long run basic results in influencing public opinion will be achieved only by the man who is able to reduce problems to the simplest terms and who has the courage to keep forever repeating them in this simplified form, despite the objections of the intellectuals.”
Joseph Goebbels
21 billion almost certainly isn’t enough. Bechtel apparently estimated that the basic cost to get the electrical, water, and distribution network to ‘minimal’ levels at 16 billion, and to ‘proper’ levels to 30 billion. And that doesn’t count rebuilding other infrastructure, funding an army, etc.
But remember, this request is basically for just 12 months of funding. And it doesn’t include any money that might also be contributed from Europe. It also doesn’t include money that might come from Iraqi oil revenues (not much now, but in a year?), and revenue from the Iraqi economy itself, mostly in the form of plentiful cheap labor.
It also includes 66 billion for the military, part of which is being used to help rebuild the infrastructure. I don’t know if this includes work by the Army Corp of Engineers, but they do a hell of a lot of reconstruction work.
I don’t know if 21 billion is the ‘right’ number, but it seems like a reasonable start.
Well, I guess since you can’t find anything to directly criticize in Bush’s address, you’ve decided to come in and hopelessly Godwin yourself.
Nice going. :wally
The President gives a speech like he is reading a story to a three year old. I remember his first televised address…Way back when stem cell research was the Big Thing. That speech and this one had the same pedantic tone.
Careful, cowboy - do you have an original comment about tonight’s debate or not?
All he did was repeat everything he has said before. Except the money was higher.
Did I say said?
Make that read. The man needs lessons in public speaking.
I won’t argue with you on that point, but the earth isn’t going to spin off its axis and enter deep space if he wins the next election.
Got a cite for that?
Heh. Unfortunately, I must admit that I’m all out of cites at the moment. 