Maybe, just maybe, some people are waking up in the US to the horrendous cost of the Iraq War and how the present presidential candidates are avoiding the issue.
"The single defining constant of the war over its disastrous, almost-five-years has been the complete and total lack of honesty from those who got us into it and have championed its continued prosecution -- including head war cheerleader John McCain. And although the driver of the 100 Year War Express is fond of offering frequent, empty, and clichéd nods to "sacrifice," he somehow thinks that's all the discussion that's needed about the costs of the war. Note to McCain: your protestations about "out of control" government spending would carry more weight if they weren't accompanied by calls for making permanent the tax cuts you once opposed as "not appropriate" in a time of war.
Maybe Saddam Hussein's head was worth $3,000,000,000,000 -- $5,000,000,000,000, maybe it wasn't (like most of the country, I believe the latter), but if McCain wants us to be there for 100, or 1,000, or a million years, he should be forced to make the case that the benefits outweigh the costs -- foreign and domestic."
So writes Arianne Huffington in The Huffington Post. Read her full post here - with some interesting links.
Op-ed columnist, Bob Herbert, writing in the NY Times tackles the same subject:
"We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.
The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
"The single defining constant of the war over its disastrous, almost-five-years has been the complete and total lack of honesty from those who got us into it and have championed its continued prosecution -- including head war cheerleader John McCain. And although the driver of the 100 Year War Express is fond of offering frequent, empty, and clichéd nods to "sacrifice," he somehow thinks that's all the discussion that's needed about the costs of the war. Note to McCain: your protestations about "out of control" government spending would carry more weight if they weren't accompanied by calls for making permanent the tax cuts you once opposed as "not appropriate" in a time of war.
Maybe Saddam Hussein's head was worth $3,000,000,000,000 -- $5,000,000,000,000, maybe it wasn't (like most of the country, I believe the latter), but if McCain wants us to be there for 100, or 1,000, or a million years, he should be forced to make the case that the benefits outweigh the costs -- foreign and domestic."
So writes Arianne Huffington in The Huffington Post. Read her full post here - with some interesting links.
Op-ed columnist, Bob Herbert, writing in the NY Times tackles the same subject:
"We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.
The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.
On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.
Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”
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