Tuesday’s editorial: Misplaced priorities
Here’s a measure of how much the Iraq war is costing America, not just in lives
and dollars, but in terms of the nation’s priorities:
When President George W. Bush signed the $186 billion Iraq spending bill two
weeks ago, the controversial part of it wasn’t the $162 billion that will be
spent on fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the $24 billion that will be
spent on other things, most of which the president said were too expensive.
Among them: a 13-week extension of unemployment benefits and a new GI Bill that
will enable the men and women fighting the war to afford to attend college.
Mr. Bush only grudgingly accepted including $8 billion for unemployment
benefits and $12 billion a year to start the new GI Bill as the price of
getting the long-delayed Iraq supplemental budget through the Congress.
Democrats had stalled the bill for more than a year, but were unable to muster
the 60 votes needed to close off debate in the Senate. The final bill was a
compromise between the president, who wanted it to contain only war funding,
and congressional Democrats, who wanted to include a potpourri of domestic
spending initiatives.
The hideous cost of the wars, $12 billion a month, constrains what the nation
can afford to do at home.
Thus, even a popular measure such as broadening GI Bill benefits was labeled
“too expensive” at $12 billion a year for five years and likely to hurt
re-enlistment rates. God forbid young men and women should leave the military
after three years to pursue education.
On the other hand, the lure of four free years of education at a top home-state
public university might be enough to attract enough volunteers to offset those
who leave. Either way, it’s fair compensation for those who have given up three
years of their lives for their country. And it’s an investment in the nation’s
future. Much of the prosperity of the post-World War II years can be attributed
to the first GI Bill.
As to the $8 billion that would be spent on extending unemployment benefits by
13 weeks, the money for that already is in a trust fund. The payments will go
to workers whose 26 weeks of state unemployment benefits have expired since May
2007 or will expire by April 2009. Some 45,000 unemployed Missourians stand to
benefit, including 11,000 immediately.
Mr. Bush had argued that extending benefits would be “counterproductive because
it would reduce the incentive for workers to find new employment.”
He argued, correctly, that unemployment rates, though growing, are not near
historic highs. But the better measure is long-term unemployment. In May, the
official national unemployment rate was 5.5 percent. But when the Labor
Department counted the number of people who have become discouraged from
looking for work or are working part time because full time jobs aren’t
available, the unemployment rate stood at 9.7 percent.
Mr. Bush’s assertion that unemployed workers would start goofing off rather
than earnestly looking for work if granted an extension is a gratuitous insult.
This is the president, after all, who hadn’t heard the cost of gasoline might
rise to $4 a gallon. He also might not have heard that the average unemployment
checks averages $299.14 a week nationally. That’s hardly enough to convince
most families to party on.
You can see a running total of the cost of the war, based on Congressional
Budget Office estimates. At the moment it’s $534.7 billion and rising faster than the eye can follow. It’s hard to watch those numbers flash by without thinking of what might have been.
It’s really painful to think about all of the good that money could have been used for. The website http://www.nationalpriorities.org/ is a great resource for seeing how else we could have spent the money.
When we pulled out of Afghanistan (where the Taliban and OSB are)and went into Iraq, oil was some $20.00 a barrel. Now oil is $146.00 a barrell, Big Oil, Halliburton and the Bush/McCain corporate lobbyists are rolling in the dough and we all suffer. More of the same with Bush/McCain!
So, Adam S and Ed Board don’t have a problem with the feds borrowing 186 billion more against the taxpayers’ overdrawn account. You just think it should be spent differently. Why is it you haven’t been able to convince Congress of your priorities? After all, a vote is a vote and a buck is a buck. The taxpayers are still paying interest on money that bought re-election votes for Dick Gephardt and Harold Volkmer years ago. How much is enough? How big can the bureaucracy get before it smothers the nation?
It seems to me that the PD should tell us how many of the so called unemployable they have hired, and of course tell
us what excellent employess they have become.
The PD doesn’t understand that as long as the government will pay the lazy not to work, they won’t work. If being hungry is not a good reason to get a job, what is? So, some gave up looking for jobs. That is their right. It is also my right to object to my tax dollaars being used to let them freeload on society.
A#,
How on earth are you reading your claims into what was stated by either AdamS or Ed Board?
I think the point being made here is we were in a surplus before Bush and his administration’s unjust and wrong war, which has also been a detrimental loss to this country on all fronts, catastrophic economically and in lost of lives.
Walker… for most of the last half century the Democrat Party ran budget deficits while they controlled Congress and appropriations. I agree that Bush and the Republican Party have been terrible stewards of the public purse. I’ve also said beforehand and since that Bush and both parties in Congress were wrong to invade Iraq with ground troops. But pretending that the peacetime budget during the record revenue growth in the nineties was because of Democrat prudence is absurd. Bigger government equals more spending. The bureaucrats, consultants, and contractors don’t work for free. Local issues such as education, welfare, housing, and health are being usurped by the federal government with much greater cost, waste, corruption, and redundancy. The one size fits all plans from full time Washington politicians and lobbyists are less effective and more costly than local government and private sector solutions. But, they do serve their purpose for incumbents of either party come election day.
Mmmmm… go to National Priorities . org, look around and try coming back to say with a straight face they are a great resource. Can’t be done.
Peel back the onion to find a nest of ACORN activists, American Friends Service Committee members, church social committees, peace & justice groups, IMF/World Bank protest organizers, Yogurt and Hummus Growers for World Peace… okay, I made-up the last one.
http://www.nationalpriorities.org/civicrm/profile?gid=15&reset=1&force=1&search=0
Talk about an interesting “lobbyist” group. Straight faces only need reply.
BobZ,
Here’s how national priorities figures out how the money from Iraq could have been used differently; figure out the current cost of the war, figure out the cost of a particular expenditure (say, hiring a public school teacher for a year), then you divide the cost of the war by the expenditure. Stephen Colbert once said that reality has a well-know liberal bias. I guess your claim would be that arithmetic has a well-known liberal bias as well!
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P-D Editorial Board still has nothing re the Colombian hostage rescue
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Must be trying to figure how George W. Bush is responsible
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In the meantime, please give us another tedious story angle on the war but this time with fake Congressional Budget Office cost ticker.
(tried to find them but there are no footnotes/explanations)
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Freed hostage: ‘You guys are terrorists’
see video: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/25575190#25575190
Adam S., the federal government paying public school teachers except on military bases and Indian reservations is a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Your mindset is what has caused the federal government to grow into an unmanageable bureaucratic nightmare. Those of you wanting the feds to do the work of state and local governments and the private sector should first repeal the Tenth Amendment. Until then, centralization of government powers in Washington has changed the U.S. Constitution from an instrument of self government to a meaningless literary work.