Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing.

Thanks Dill

First Let me congratulate you for an apt, but humble and self deprecating title for your post.

The purpose of the topic is to gather opinions on how close the war is taking us to our economic collapse. You have given one, and your point about Vietnam is valid. Government spending even on weapons can boost the economy for a short time but debt tends to catch up eventually. It would be useful to know how robust the rest of our economy was in the late 1960s, and what effect the Vietnam war had on inflation and the stock market in the early 1970s, which was a volatile era. Perhaps someone can enlighten us.

Out spending the Russians is another valid point but I suspect that there were many other factors to the collapse of the Russian economy -you know, all that stuff about the dead hand of socialism and the benefits of the invisible hand of free markets.

Some of us believe that the out spending on the military during the Reagan years had more to do with the selfish interests of the military industrial complex having undue influence on an almost senile President.

Is it not reasonable to ask questions about how much the out spending tactic will hurt ordinary Americans?

The idea of readiness for a war being measured in terms of the potential available in the economy to respond to the financial demands is as old as Sun Tzu. It should be the first thing that a government thinks about.

On the trivia:

I was referring to Iraq -a quintessentially Arab country. Sure, there are probably other ethnic groups represented among the terrorists, but it would be awfully pedantic to give them all credits in a piece like this. I still prefer to blame Arab culture more than Islam, but that is just me. That is a topic that has already been well thrashed out with Will. Of course there is a strong relationship, but if you want precision blaming Islam captures more of the uninvolved than "Arabs".

I am afraid that the rest of your response was the usual off target emotional and personal personal rant - quite unworthy of omnes nerdi. I did not say we should pull out of Iraq this time. I gave an opinion that our presence was sustaining terrorists. I know you don't agree with that because we have discussed it before. It is relevant in this discussion because we are discussing a drain on the American economy as a possible strategy of the terrorists.

Our arming of the Sunnis to fight the insurgents is about the dumbest piece of policy that any US Government has come up with since the Little Big Horn. Even the French were not that stupid. Anyhow it is quite off topic and you are leading me off target again. This thread is about the economic effects of the War on America.

The impact of the war on the economy of Iraq is irrelevant. I imagine that after Saddam and our intervention it had nowhere to go but up anyway, and if it has, that is consistent with my pressure cooker metaphor. Which does not mean that you or I are right there.

Perhaps America is not close to the edge. I certainly hope not, as I am intending to live on superannuation for a long time.

We have not been in quite the same situation as this before, and it is worth thinking about in terms of an economic model as well as in the usual armchair general manner.

I think we are mature enough to handle that without personal abuse.

These reports are a couple of years old now. I haven't found anything more recent, but the trend is clear so we can extrapolate. I think there is evidence that we are closer to the edge of the economic cliff than the nerds who have reacted to this topic so far want to believe.

This tends to indicate that the complacent view that, we made it through the Cold War so we can handle Iraq, is starting to look a bit naive.

These first quotes come from the SanFrancisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/17/MNG5GDPEK31.DTL Sure, they are just opinions, but they come from credible sources.

"Osama (bin Laden) doesn't have to win; he will just bleed us to death," said Michael Scheuer, a former counterterrorism official at the CIA who led the pursuit of bin Laden and recently retired after writing two books critical of the Clinton and Bush administrations. "He's well on his way to doing it."

The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, has estimated that the Korean War cost about $430 billion and the Vietnam War cost about $600 billion, in current dollars. According to the latest estimates, the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion.

(I presume that the statutory debt limit has been raised again a few times more since these reports.)

Put simply, critics say, the war is not making the United States safer and is harming U.S. taxpayers by saddling them with an enormous debt burden, since the war is being financed with deficit spending.

One of the most vocal Republican critics has been Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who said the costs of the war -- many multiples greater than what the White House had estimated in 2003 -- are throwing U.S. fiscal priorities out of balance.

"It's dangerously irresponsible," Hagel said in February of the war spending.

In the last 50 years, the United States has raised its debt ceiling more than 70 times, and budget watchers say lawmakers have become expert at delaying or disguising this politically perilous task.

"The antics they go through are incredible, and they've gotten worse,'' said Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington, D.C.

For instance, in his Dec. 29 letter, Snow said that while the debt limit "will be reached in mid-February 2006," he could delay default for a month using "available prudent and legal actions."

These actions, MacGuineas said, would include putting IOUs instead of cash into federal retirement accounts -- a tactic that Clinton administration Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin first employed in 1996, when Republican lawmakers balked at raising a debt ceiling then at $4.9 trillion.

LorDilly,

Here's me late again.

Perhaps you were kidding, but I would have been intimidated by a response like that to a genuine attempt to start a debate on an important subject.

I think that Occams pressure cooler metaphor is original and entirely consistent with our troops in Iraq achieving their objectives and behaving very professionally.

Our strategy seems to be to keep the peace while the new Iraqui Government gets on its feet. So our aim is to suppress the violence - ideally to a level that the Iraq Government can deal with.

So your view that most everything is going according to plan is compatible with Occams', and I think he deserves an apology for your intemperate attack on what proved to be a good start to very thought provoking discussion.

I think that through all the posts on this thread he has made a convincing argument on the debt burden of America now being such as to make continuing the war in Iraq unfundable. In fact, he showed that this Administration cannot afford just about any big expense. It is a shame that it ended wout having a professional economics nerd view, although there were some authoritative sources quoted.