wring, let me simply say that you’ve got to be a damn good egg if you’d actually apologize for an insult hurled in the Pit. I mean, what has this place come to?!?
So, no hard feelings. You’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty, and I’ll buy you a beer next time you’re in town.
back atchya. I’ll buy you a beer when you’re in town.
I looked where I thought your sig would be and it said:
“Last edited by Guinastasia : Yesterday at 03:11 PM.”
What, exactly, makes you think that the Administration would not have spent that $500 billion on something else if we hadn’t spent it on Iraq?
More than likely it would have been spent on Katrina relief or somesuch. Doubtless, a more worthy cause, but not necessarily a fiscally responsible one.
“Hey, we’re running a massive deficit. Let’s cut taxes! That will fix things, right?”
Don’t you have to find a bigger cause to claim that the 20% is secondary? I mean, what if that deficit can be broken into 17 pieces, and the largest is the Iraq war (just speculating; I have no idea)? That would make the 20% the “primary” cause, right?
Well, I don’t necessarily think we would’ve saved the money. But it seems fairly reasonable to blame the thing they’re wasting money on in this reality instead of blaming the thing they’d waste money on in a different reality, just as long as we lay the blame correctly. And yeah, that’s not much blame, if we’re talking about the weak dollar. But that shouldn’t get them off the hook entirely.
Not necessarily. You have to remember that it’s market speculation that actually determines exchange rates. When you get down to it, anything that upsets speculators about the US economy could lead to a slackening in their demand for dollars, which in turn would weaken the dollar compared to other currencies. So it’s not just the deficit, it’s all sorts of things (e.g. interest rates, the recession, etc.) that could affect things. Speculators might theoretically be upset about the war, of course, which could potentially make our desert debacle a more important factor than conventional financial analysis might otherwise dictate, but frankly, there’s been plenty of reasons for investors to be leery of US securities for the last 7 years.
If our general govermental imprudence in fiscal policy is the primary cause of the lack of demand for dollars, then the war is only one example of that imprudence. So the war itself would still be secondary, in the back seat to the overall recklessness and outright stupidity that we’ve had to endure for these many long and arduous years.
I think one has to look at both sides of the ledger. Deficits are no more caused by additional spending than they are by shortfalls in revenue. I think the Bush tax cuts have done far more damage to our budget than the spending in Iraq. How one can say that the war in Iraq is to blame for our deficit, but say nothing about the tax cuts, Katrina reconstruction, etc. just doesn’t make sense. There’s not a single thing in the budget that causes deficits, it’s the whole budget that causes deficits.
That’s true, however, when one is looking for places to cut one’s budget, t’would be prudent to keep paying rent, utlities, buy food and prescriptions, but say, eliminate the budget item “hookers and blow”.
Aw, c’mon- the economics talk was just getting interesting (after we got all the hissing and spitting out of the way). What about the sub-prime crisis? What about the Fed giving $600 to every US American? What about interest rate cuts?
Man, are your priorities out of whack.