If there is to be war, there will be bills. Note the US is scheduled to hit its controversial debt ceiling sometime in October.
How can the US pay for even ‘limited strikes’? I’d rather not cut anything to bomb Syria- I’d cut bombing Syria given the chance. But if it is to happen, where will the money come from?
I propose a Syria PAYGO. The Bush tax cuts for incomes down to $250k are repealed so that we quit hitting the debt ceiling so often. Then, on a quarterly basis, we increase income taxes on those making over $250k by an amount estimated to cover the costs incurred by action in Syria.
Yes, this plan does seem prejudiced against the wealthy. But, are the poor going to pay for it? How? No, we’re not cutting Medicare &etc. to bomb another Middle Eastern country. The people with the money are going to pay for it, cash.
Given the giant size of the U.S. military, lobbing a few cruise missiles will be a drop in the bucket. Does anyone ask, on a daily basis, how are we going to pay for another carrier group deployment to the Pacific? That, a totally ordinary run-of-the-mill task force deployment, costs hundreds of times as much as the few missiles we’ll launch.
Think of it as refreshing the inventory. Missiles get decommissioned and scrapped every so often. Why not launch them instead of taking them to a range for dismantling? They’re already paid for.
If that’s your hypothetical you did a poor job of explaining it in the OP where you only mentioned the cost of bombing. It’s also an odd hypothetical to pose after everyone who matters have said there will be no “boots on the ground”.
Just to inform, while cruise missiles are expensive (relative to say, anything an ordinary person would purchase) they are already bought and paid for and are just sitting around waiting to be used. Launching them really doesn’t cost much of anything, the sailors involved are already paid and going to be paid regardless of if they launch those missiles or not.
Now, there is a small adjustment (a couple hundred bucks) for combat pay, based on serving in areas designated combat zones [more areas currently are so designated than one might think], but unless I’m looking at outdated information the ships in the Mediterranean wouldn’t fall within any of those combat zones so just having moved them there hasn’t incurred us any notable extra expenses in terms of combat pay.
It’s possible the mission to launch missiles will be designated in some way that might result in extra pay.
I also don’t follow the fleet movements normally, but usually ships are tasked to be in port on x date, and then tasked to leave on x date where they go from a to b to c for patrols then to port y where they stay for z days and etc. So it’s already planned typically that ships be out there consuming fuel and resources. If this deployment took ships off their course such that they’ll use significantly more fuel and supplies then that would represent some extra cost–but unlikely to be a significant amount.
As noted, this isn’t going to cost very much, so your PAYGO plan here, if it’s targeted only at paying for Obama’s Excellent Syrian Adventure, will be about as symbolic as said adventure.
If you’re going to do that, why not target the tax at the people actually responsible? Make up a list of everyone in Congress who voted for it, plus Obama for signing it, and make them foot the bill.
I say no. Quagmire isn’t hyperbole, it isn’t ENOUGH of a hyperbole. We should really call it “Obama’s Death March Holocaust War Crime Babykilling Worse than Hitler Adventure.” Edit: I will come up with an even more exciting name once something happens.
Nobody has even hit on the real issue here: once we bomb Syria, we are now a belligerent. That means we will be financially responsible for millions of refugees -that will flee our efforts to help them. We are already supplying $800 million in aid to the existing refugees-and with another 2 million, we will be on the hook for billions. But that is OK-we will just borrow from China. For a nation that won’t even pay the healthcare of its own wounded soldiers, taking on the burden of millions of Syrians is strange indeed.
Exactly this. And, any money spent on extra pay, or to replace missiles, is spent in the US.
We aren’t bombing Syria with pallets of dollar bills- though that would be cost effective.
So it’s a jobs program as well as a dominance issue.
(Seems to me combat pay involves getting shot at, and not shooting at people. There may be a missile launching bonus of some sort, I dunno.)
Well, if you’re just going to completely make up shit, then this potential war in Syria could be a very big deal indeed.
The US has, and will continue, to provide humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees. But the idea that if we go to war we will be forced to pay billions of dollars to refugees is a total figment of your imagination.
Pure speculation here, but my WAG is the money will come from…taxes.
Are The Rich™ pushing for this war? If not, I’m not seeing why we’d go with your plan to pay for a few cruise missiles or maybe air strikes on Syria. Sounds to me like you are just using this as a (poor) excuse to soak the rich, since I doubt this is going to cost a lot of money.
To me, “no boots on the ground” sounds like something a salesman would say. Once we get into fighting, I personally predict we’ll get sucked all the way in, because, you know, WMDs!!! :eek:
I could, of course, be wrong.
Well I doubt it will be easy and then over and done with. Soak the rich? I’m not grinding an axe here, I am planning ahead so that this doesn’t become the latest excuse to cut education, Medicare, Social Security, and so on.
I’m saying the Syrian quagmire presents a revenue problem, not a spending problem. If you don’t want to “soak the rich” as you put it, how about proposing some funding mechanism of your own, before we start bombing?
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I’m saying the Syrian quagmire presents a revenue problem, not a spending problem. If you don’t want to “soak the rich” as you put it, how about proposing some funding mechanism of your own, before we start bombing?
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Call me crazy, but I’d say fund it out of our Defense budget. I don’t know what you think this is going to cost, but as a poster upthread stated, how did we fund the ‘Libyan quagmire’? We didn’t seem to need any sort of special funding for that, and from all indications what we did in Libya is going to be a lot more than what we are planning in Syria, so I don’t see a problem.
There’s a certain size of operation that’s most effective, and anything above or below that level of operations costs extra.
Bombing two small countries gently may cost a lot more than dropping a lot more bombs on one big country.