Because when you spend too much money on something you believe is a good cause, it is not nearly as unpleasant as spending too much money on something you think is a really stupid idea. This is not rocket science…TRM
The 2003 Medicare bill is costed by the CBO to cost well over a trillion dollars over ten years and is completely unfunded. The Obama healthcare bill is costed to about half that but Obama is making sure revenues will be raised so it won’t add to the deficits.
Both programs are to fund socialist healthcare. The GOP all voted for and praised the first, more expensive, unfunded socialist healthcare bill but are opposing the cheaper, funded, socialist healthcare bill. Why is that?
How did you miss it? “Promote the general welfare” is there right next to “provide for the common defence”.
Does that sec. 8 language grant a power to Congress? Or does it explain the below clauses that grants powers to Congress?
I’m asking because I don’t know and the wiki article is really long.
No, but Osama Bin Laden apparently did. Was he created? Is he real?
If you can (which I doubt) put the Iraq war aside, what is the purpose of the war in Afghanistan? To bomb more brown people without regret?
No, but it’s hypocritical. “The government shouldn’t be able to spend money on things like this … (except when I like the idea)” is a shitty position to argue from.
Yes, Osama is real. Exactly what does he have to do with Iraq?
I’m not entirely sure of the real purpose for the war in Afghanistan. Obama claimed it was just going to be a “taking out the bad guys” operation, lots of drones and special forces, when he took office. But after a couple of months they changed to a counterinsurgency strategy. The current claim is to build up the institutions of Afghanistan for twenty or thirty years until they’re up to the level of Pakistan, which is of course the country where Osama now lives. The ultimate purpose of all this is almost certainly strategic rather than anything to do with terrorism. It’s going to create terrorism, not end it.
They’ve pretty well demonstrated what they are like over the years. Greedy, incompetent and as a rule hypocrites who are only “fiscally conservative” until they get into power and can indulge themselves.
In this country? Not a chance. Americans as a whole like killing foreigners.
Yes, but he was never anything but a sideshow, a pretext. There was no serious attempt to catch or kill him once Bush took power.
To a degree; it usually involves that with America. It was started by Bush mainly as something that had to be gotten out of the way so he could attack Iraq; it was therefore accomplished in a sloppy, incomplete fashion that resulted in the mess we see and let Osama Bin Laden get away. As for why Obama hasn’t stopped it; I expect he has the typical Democratic paranoia over being called soft.
Cite, please, and for these specific claims.
Regards,
Shodan
Well, as to the OP, yes, I consider myself someone that likes the government to be fiscally conservative, and yes, I am outraged at the expenditures in Iraq.
I’m also outraged that equal blame is not levied at Democrats (whom are presumably the ideological opposite of fiscal conservatives by common definition, right?), whom not only voted by and large for the mess we are in over there now, but continue it.
I am very disappointed in our government in this regard. The Iraq war has cost how much money? And in light of the state of the economy, how much would that money have helped keep the government ahead of the game? Shit, would the economy even be THIS bad if the Iraq war had never happened?
Equal blame? Who led? Who lied?
They went along with the charade and now they are running the show, and nothing seems to have changed one iota.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter much, the die has been cast. But to the OP, yeah, it’s been a HUGE waste of lives and money.
I’m a fiscal conservative who never supported the Iraq war. Where’s the outrage? Here:
OUTRAGE!!!
Well, gee, for one thing, the war had not happened yet, at that point. Now, it has happened. Pretty big “iota”, by my estimation. YMMV.
No it isn’t. It’s “happening”. Right now. Seriously.
An excellent point. WWII dragged us out of the Depression because we had sky-high taxes on the rich and funnelled all that money to the poor and middle class through massive military spending.
Military spending however, is ultimately wealth-destroying. Unused weapons sit idle, adding nothing to future prosperity. Used weapons have a tendency to be destroyed. A certain amount of military spending is a necessity for our safety, but any beyond that necessity is just waste. As Dick Dastardly says, we might as well just be building the tanks and then dumping them in the ocean.
It’s much better to funnel money from the rich to the poor and middle class by spending on things that lead to increased prosperity down the road: scientific research, highways, schools, etc. This type of spending provides a double benefit. It put money into the hands of people who will actually spend it, stimulating the economy, and it increases our capacity for greater wealth production in the future.
This says one trillion over ten years, but I read something else on either their site or somewhere similar that said that number didn’t take the savings created by treating sick people early under universal coverage versus letting their conditions deteriorate till they’re sick enough to get emergency room treatment under the current system, which works out much more expensive.
And Obama is planning to fund this by a surtax on people earning $350K p.a., something that’s been in almost every article about this for a couple of weeks now. Or a million a year, depending on the articles. If I bump into the second article that had the half trillion in preventative care saving in again I’ll post it.
This is a joke, right?
Why would it be? It make perfect sense; tax the largely parasitic wealthy, funnel the money to the people who actually make the economy go, and the depression is overcome. Get the money moving again instead of sitting in a rich guy’s bank account somewhere accruing interest.
There are quite a number of fiscal conservatives who didn’t support the Iraq war. There are some like me who expressed that by voting against Bush quite happily. If I am going to waste money I would rather do it on healthcare or even bailouts than killing. The non-religiously motivated fiscal conservative lives in a political wasteland betwixt two factions that want to spend money on their own assinine pursuits. You don’t notice because people like me don’t have strong representation in either party.
I will never understand people like Der Trihs who think it is evil to want to slow the movement of massive amounts of money from one group’s pet projects to the other’s every four years. The collateral waste that comes with all of that is a crying shame, not to mention the slow leakage of freedom.
The Iraq war destroys freedom in a quite obvious way, by bombs and guns. The bailout of GM does it in smaller ways by artificially promoting ineffeciency. Somewhere there is an entrepenuer who would have snapped up the state of the art GM facilities for a song and used those cheap assets to start a new, more productive domestic auto industry. Neither makes fiscal conservatives happy.