Re: Shots fired at Pak Check post by US-Afghan Forces
^^ Only Bush is capable of saying this kind of stuff....
Re: Shots fired at Pak Check post by US-Afghan Forces
LP, surely you can see how wars can be a drag on the economy? Look at where the trillions we spent on Iraq and Afghanistan could have been put to better use in education and improving infrastructure across America.
I think there is more to it though. America has used wars as the impetus for technological innovation. A huge proportion of civilian technology have their roots in defense research (and that includes the internet).
i urge you to think about two things:
1) is quality if education really directly proportional to level of expenditure, beyond a certain minimum?
2) the dollars involved in a population living 10 years longer than what social security was calculated upon, dwarfs any wartime expenditure. By 2020 (which is only 8.5 years from now) the interest service on borrowings from social security is expected to be 900billion. But the short fall in social security is projected to be even bigger than that!
in contrast, the wars cost under $400B annually and employ a lot of people
Re: Shots fired at Pak Check post by US-Afghan Forces
We are just getting to know the costs of the war because Bush did out of the budget spending bills called supplementals.
Wars actually slow down an economy. I was watching this old dutch dude give a lecture in india (banglore or madras) and he had a chart that showed that China and Japan's growth, as depicted by a line, was really flat when they were in wars like the opium wars for the chinese in the nineteenth century. Now, the US is not facing the same instability as china with all the drug addicts, but disability rehabilitation and war effort has certainly produced new technological advances but it is at the cost of higher-end R&D where China is catching up to America.