Budget Problems, America? Try Ending Your Many Wars

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/budget_problems_america_try_ending_your_many_wars_20110601/?ln

To the wayfaring American citizen, the view of Washington, D.C., from abroad is as bizarre as that of Oz. One cannot believe what is happening. How can Republican leaders have convinced themselves that the way to be re-elected is by doing away with Medicare and Social Security—about all the security that America’s old people have to hang on to these days. (Not the rich ones. There are not very many rich, old people in the United States—look around you.) When the Republicans lose a “sure” Republican congressional seat to a Democrat on these issues, as they did in May in New York state, they display genuine bewilderment.

They think that voters are all single-mindedly obsessed with the national debt and the present fight over the forthcoming budget. I mentioned Oz, but of course the Wizard proved to be a warm-hearted mountebank who knew how Dorothy could get back to Kansas. Mountebanks are aplenty in Washington but they have nothing to offer Dorothy, who was just a poor farm girl from the Great Plains (where, incidentally, the American Populist movement of the late 19th century started, nearly electing president the great orator William Jennings Bryan on a “free silver” ticket).

If the government would like $3 trillion to round out the budget for next year, why not call off the wars that nobody can any longer explain? Afghan operations alone are set to run to $113 billion this fiscal year, according to The Washington Post. The Pentagon is asking for $107 billion in the next fiscal year for Afghanistan alone.

The cost of maintaining a single American soldier in Afghanistan for a year is $1 million. That’s because of the stupefying cost of transporting supplies and the continuing construction of bases there. (But aren’t we supposed to be leaving?) The cost of an Afghan national army, which the country has never felt necessary in the past but that the U.S. now wants it to possess (so that it can execute missions that Washington considers vital, not to them but to us) has cost $28 billion thus far, and the U.S. training effort for 2012 is a requested $12.5 billion.

More at the link --

[raccoon]

1. K&R. nt

[NightWatcher]

2. the few jobs we have left are making bombs and guns and tanks and other death paraphrenalia

My brother who has suckled at the military contractor teet for a few years now tells me that we cannot end the wars, egardless of how many people we kill or have killed on our side. It's the Manufacturing, stupid.

[krabigirl]

3. Yep. Of course, hardly anyone in either party agrees. Very sick indeed.

[NNN0LHI]

4. Many of the kids around here graduate high school and go right into the military

Only jobs they can get.

:(

Don

[RC]

6. That was the plan all along.

[FiveGoodMen]

5. Who'd have thought that Obama was going to make it worse?