brip blap - Latest Comments in cost of war

Re: cost of war

Brooke — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:09:14 -0000

I just had to do a paper on propaganda from WW One and I couldn't get over the amount of rationing done by U.S. civilians. Can you imagine if we had actually rationed for this war and stayed without a deficit? How much would the American public appreciate the war (or even pay more attention) if they had to ration or even if there were a draft? Just my two cents...

Re: cost of war

plonkee — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 14:45:50 -0000

War is pretty much always a waste of money. By definition, you spend a lot of money blowing things up, and then peace breaks out and you spend a lot of money money rebuilding it.

Re: cost of war

bripblap — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 11:01:58 -0000

Thanks for the comments!
@USAindebt: I would just take issue with the word "wasted" - I think it's entirely dependent on whether you view Iraq as a critical step in defending America against terrorism. "Wasted" is a point of view rather than a fact. If it does, in fact, divert the terrorist's efforts away from the US then it was money well spent. If the other efforts (spying, increased monitoring of terrorist groups, etc.) could have accomplished the same goal without the war in Iraq, then "wasted" would be more fair. But either way it's hard to say what could have been, other than to point out black-and-white dollars spent one way versus another.

@Jon: Fair enough, although I would argue that cancer certainly strikes at a lot of people in the primes of their lives who lived at least adequately healthy lifestyles and were blameless for getting it. 3500 people, the great majority of them women, die from breast cancer every month and many of them are not elderly. I know several people who didn't smoke, ate normally and were otherwise fairly healthy who got cancer and suffered terribly or died because of it - which means, to me, no matter how old they are there would be value in eliminating that pain for people if possible.

I really was trying not to be political! I'm simply comparing the costs of one thing (a war) to costs of another thing (health care, pensions, baby bonds). I imagine it comes across as political since the country is so firmly divided into "for it/against it" camps on almost every issue, which is unfortunate. A rational discussion of pros and cons of any issue should be possible in the political arena, and I'm afraid that increasingly it isn't because of emotions.

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Re: cost of war

Jon — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:57:12 -0000

For not being political, you sure snuck in plenty of issues. :)

The only one I'll comment on is your comparison of natural causes of death to murder. I'm more upset by things like 9/11 than by diseases that, for the most part, affect people who have already had full lives. My grandfather died of cancer, but he was over 90 years old. I don't feel angry about his death. If someone I knew died in 9/11, I would still feel angry about it. If someone I knew was killed by a drunk driver, I would feel angry about it.

Now if there were some new disease that randomly killed a million people a year, every year, without regard to age or health, then yeah that would be a bigger threat than terrorists, murderers, and drunk drivers all combined. That's probably not going to happen though.

Okay well one more comment. I hadn't heard of baby bonds before, interesting idea!

Re: cost of war

USAinDebt — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:13:10 -0000

It is sad that billions of taxpayer's money are wasted on this. I wanted to write an article on this recently, but I guess I am late! Very nice post, I will link it from my blog because people really need to read this.