.
so, as the red and blue teams in congress continue their bickering about how best to rearrange the deck chairs on the titanic, i would ask you to take a look at the following chart, courtesy of the st. louis fed--i've put it up before; it's one of my favorites--
and, as you contemplate the more-or-less straight line in which federal spending has increased over the last 10 years--a doubling, from $1.9 trillion when dubya took office to $3.8 trillion today, during a period of relatively low inflation--i ask you, my readers, the following question:
is your life better or easier than it was 10 years ago?
and i'm not asking whether your quality of life has doubled like the federal spending; no, i'm just asking if all this debt creation has benefited you, mr. or ms. average joe or ethel, in any material way.
no? you must not be a banker or a federal employee. how about this question:
do you feel safer than you did 10 years ago?
i remember back when bush and his cronies initially estimated their glorious iraqi adventure to make the world safe for democracy would cost a mere $60 billion, and afghanistan a fraction of that--and scoffed when it was suggested the cost might go as high as $100 billion. today, of course, such numbers seem quaint when compared to the $1.2 trillion we're at today.
but hey, small price to pay to make us safer, right? no? well, something the government's doing has gotta be working, doesn't it? how about this question:
is all the stimulus money at least creating jobs like it's supposed to?
well, yeah, it is. of course, these new jobs are costing us an average of $278,000 apiece--but hey, if it gets people back to work then it's worth it, right?
no? well, here are a few more:
are we a stronger, more powerful or more prestigious nation than we were 10 years ago?
is our industrial/manufacturing base stronger?
is public education better than it was 10 years ago?
is our infrastructure better than it was 10 years ago?
are there fewer poor people?
is social security better funded?
no, no, no, no, no and no? then, if creating and then spending all those trillions of dollars didn't solve any of the problems mentioned above, i have to ask all you taxpayers out there:
as its catalog of failures and voracious appetite both continue to grow, are you still willing to continue to feed the beast of big government in whatever quantities it demands?
and if the answer to that question is yes, then can somebody please tell me
2 comments:
A great deal of that money went to fund wars in faraway places. I think in retrospect, they may be known as Cheney's follies. But, it is what it is.
So, to blame Obama for the mess he inherited is unfair.
I blame the Republicans.
What I like most about that chart, MKF, is that it's an argument ender -- at least, for this argument:
Random liberal: "Look how great the economy was under Clinton. Obviously we can raise taxes without killing the economy."
Me: "Leaving aside the fact that tax rates and actual revenues as a percentage of GDP are loosely connected, at best, does that mean you're prepared to cut federal spending in half, too -- just like under Clinton?"
For n: the latest estimate, from a Brown University study, is that Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan combined have a cost of about $4 trillion. That's a MUCH bigger estimate than any others I've seen, but it is supposed to include such secondary costs as long-term care for wounded vets and interest on money borrowed to pay for the wars.
Notably, it also includes the projected costs of these wars all the way out to 2020, which plays nicely into the hands of Harry Reid, when he proposes "deficit reduction" measures including cutting out military expenditures out to 2020 despite the president's promises that we will be out of there long before then.
So, look at MKF's chart again. Cut that figure from Brown down by about 40% and you should see something close to the real costs of these wars to date. Somewhere between 2 and 2.5 trillion... or less than the combined deficits (not budgets, just deficits) of the last two years.
Now, n:
"A great deal of that money went to fund wars in faraway places." Actually, it was a relatively small amount of that money.
"So, to blame Obama for the mess he inherited is unfair." No one here did that.
"I blame the Republicans." Good for you. If they created the problem, how do you propose to fix it?
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