Candace

Talmadge

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February 25, 2008

Want to Goose the Economy? Get U.S. Out of Iraq

Forget the election-year bribe – oops, tax rebate. Getting out of Iraq will do far more to boost the ailing economy.

That’s the opinion of 68 percent of those polled during the first week of the month by AP/Ipsos. Some 48 percent of respondents agreed that leaving Iraq would help fix the country’s economy “a great deal,” while another 20 percent thought it would help at least somewhat.

The American people at last have caught on to the fiscal scam better known as the Iraq war.

This misbegotten military morass represents the largest-ever transfer of wealth from the U.S. Treasury (taxpayer dollars) to the hands of a relative few. These consist primarily of contractors and war profiteers with lingering White House ties (e.g. Halliburton and its former CEO, Vice President Dick Cheney).

This immoral war is also the largest ever transfer of debt to current and future Americans. Our country is in hock beyond its eyeballs to the Chinese, the Japanese and who-knows-what other countries. This tsunami of red ink keeps rising every day that any Americans – soldiers or civilian contractors – remain in Iraq.

In addition, the unending violence in Iraq fans the Middle East instability that has helped push up oil prices to the point where just one refinery outage is excuse enough to hike the cost of a barrel of crude to more than $100 for the first time. Rising fuel prices have been sapping the life out of the U.S. economy since 2005.

And while the tax rebate debate between Capitol Hill and the White House received widespread coverage, this poll result was ignored. What a shock. The Bush administration, the Congress and the ever-compliant media have all played starring roles in our fiscal debacle. They naturally consider it tacky for anyone to call attention to it or to connect the dots between our economic woes and the endless Iraq money spigot.

But wait – there’s more!

Iraq is the white elephant gift that just keeps on giving. Even if we were to vacate Iraq completely within the week, our ruinous national debt will mean little money for health care reform, for repairing and rebuilding our national infrastructure, for funding even reasonable education mandates, for much needed scientific research, etc. It will also spell disaster for Medicare and Social Security, despite the convenient fiction of payroll taxes. Those payroll taxes get dumped into the same pot as all other tax revenues, and now there’s nothing in there except a big fat IOU.

That was the plan, after all. George W. Bush’s hatred of New Deal and Great Society social programs has been documented back at least to his days as a Harvard MBA student, where he argued against them fiercely with his case study classmates.

In typical fashion, Bush and his minions did not shrink the federal government to the point where they could drown it in a bathtub – to use a favorite phrase from one of their favored ideologues, Grover Norquist. No such luck. Instead, they expanded the federal government and federal spending to the point where it can only explode from its own sheer volume and rain down an unholy mess upon all of our mortgaged-to-the-hilt houses.

When the U.S. government reneges completely on the promises inherent in Social Security and Medicare, we will remember those who made it all possible. They won’t suffer any consequences, however, since they’ll be living safely in non-extradition countries enjoying all those trillions stashed in Cayman Islands bank accounts.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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