This is a serious question. I’ve heard a lot of noise from conservatives over the issue of Universal Healthcare, and how it’s “theft” to take their money and spend it on other peoples medical expenses. But I haven’t heard so much as a single peep of outrage over the enormous amount of money that has been and will inevitably be spent in Iraq.
The cost of the Democrats health care plan is an estimated 1.5 trillion over 10 years. So we’re talking about similar amounts of money here. Why is one “theft” but the other isn’t even worth mentioning?
Because the “fiscal conservatives” don’t actually care about saving money. They just hate the idea of helping non-rich people. They’ll spend money like water to bomb and invade people, ignore limitless amounts of corporate corruption - but they hate, hate, hate anything that’ll help the filthy peasants.
That’s sorta it, but not quite. It has to do with two things.
[ol]
[li]Fiscal conservatives tend to support small government. One of the main roles of a small government is defense. Healthcare is not one of them. Therefore, spending money on one is justifiable, but the other is not.[/li][li]Wars have a history of helping people make money. Pretty much every fiscal conservative credits World War II with getting the U.S. out of the Great Depression. And, by definition, a conservative clings to the past, trying to repeat what they believed worked, rather than try something new.[/li][/ol]
So, how is this similar to what Der Trihs said? He pointed out that the primary concern of financial conservatives is not always to save money. And, yes, they are generally against a redistribution of wealth.
Technically, they are only against a redistrabution of wealth downward where it will do the most good. They are happy to take your tax money to subsidized tax cuts to the rich.
Because Iraq doesn’t count, if Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq the world would now be under threat from Saddam and his fearsome weapons of mass destruction. You’re either with us or against us.
For one thing, protecting the homeland against threats foreign and domestic IS an activity authorized by the constitution. Providing universal health care is decidedly NOT authorized, and could easily be construed as prohibited by the ninth and tenth amendments…TRM
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a fine example of what I call the “liberal side-step.” Having lost the argument defined in the thread, our intrepid liberal cannily substitutes a totally different issue, hoping to camouflage his miserable failure…TRM
Oh, what a surprise, the usual suspects are out in force, making up bullshit to slander fiscal conservatives with.
If you want the opinion of an actual fiscal conservative on the matter, it’s that there are more effective ways to argue against the Iraq War than using the fiscal conservative argument. It’s a lot easier to convince people that invading foreign countries and killing people is bad than it is to convince them that government control is bad.
In the same way, you wouldn’t see many people making an economic argument against slavery, when the moral argument against slavery is more likely to get people’s support.
OK how about the Medicare bill that Bush passed in 2003? That put a trillion plus dollars on the national credit card, no attempt at all was made to raise revenue to cover the costs of that bill. And it was written to take effect in 2009, after Bush left office so that the big jump in debt needed to pay it wouldn’t show up in the history of Bush’s budget numbers, just his unfortunate successor. So you have total fiscal irresponsibility couple with a complete abdication of personal responsibility, the two things Republicans are supposed to stand for.
Fiscal conservatives such as yours truly have no great love of GW Bush. I agree with the Iraq war, but not with his profligate spending. So don’t think invoking his name is going to give anyone pause…TRM
Certainly, one can debate whether Iraq was ever a threat to the US or not, and that is a valid question. But it is NOT the issue raised by the OP, and trying to invoke it is just dodging the argument.
What’s interesting is that the long boom that followed WWII was enabled by the economic program undertaken during WWII: Great increases in taxes on corporations & upper incomes, plus wage raises for the working class. In the end, it was redistribution that built the large consumer middle class, & fed the gargantuan postwar economy. Paul Krugman explains this convincingly in The Conscience of a Liberal.
So the war saved the economy because the sacrifices necessary to win the war enabled the most redistributive parts of the New Deal.
Not to mention WW2 was the biggest single government spending program in history. If we’d built all the tanks, planes etc. and just tipped them into the sea they would have had the same economic effect i.e. dragging us out of economic depression.