No Responses to “Palin Wearing ‘SarahCuda’ Shirt”

1. RacerX says:

   September 29, 2008 at 2:42 PM

   Another excellent choice of a post by Shawn, Sarah in a tight t-shirt. Nice. This is what qualifies one to be a Repube.

   Reply
2. RacerX says:

   September 29, 2008 at 2:47 PM

   There is no such thing as a free lunch, and there is no
   such thing as a free war. The Iraq adventure has
   seriously weakened the U.S. economy, whose woes now go
   far beyond loose mortgage lending. You can’t spend $3
   trillion — yes, $3 trillion — on a failed war abroad
   and not feel the pain at home.

   Some people will scoff at that number, but we’ve done
   the math. Senior Bush administration aides certainly
   pooh-poohed worrisome estimates in the run-up to the
   war. Former White House economic adviser Lawrence
   Lindsey reckoned that the conflict would cost $100
   billion to $200 billion; Defense Secretary Donald H.
   Rumsfeld later called his estimate “baloney.”
   Administration officials insisted that the costs would
   be more like $50 billion to $60 billion. In April 2003,
   Andrew S. Natsios, the thoughtful head of the U.S.
   Agency for International Development, said on
   “Nightline” that reconstructing Iraq would cost the
   American taxpayer just $1.7 billion. Ted Koppel, in
   disbelief, pressed Natsios on the question, but Natsios
   stuck to his guns. Others in the administration, such
   as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, hoped
   that U.S. partners would chip in, as they had in the
   1991 Persian Gulf War, or that Iraq’s oil would pay for
   the damages.

   The end result of all this wishful thinking? As we
   approach the fifth anniversary of the invasion, Iraq is
   not only the second longest war in U.S. history (after
   Vietnam), it is also the second most costly –
   surpassed only by World War II.

   Why doesn’t the public understand the staggering scale
   of our expenditures? In part because the administration
   talks only about the upfront costs, which are mostly
   handled by emergency appropriations. (Iraq funding is
   apparently still an emergency five years after the war
   began.) These costs, by our calculations, are now
   running at $12 billion a month — $16 billion if you
   include Afghanistan. By the time you add in the costs
   hidden in the defense budget, the money we’ll have to
   spend to help future veterans, and money to refurbish a
   military whose equipment and materiel have been greatly
   depleted, the total tab to the federal government will
   almost surely exceed $1.5 trillion.

   But the costs to our society and economy are far
   greater. When a young soldier is killed in Iraq or
   Afghanistan, his or her family will receive a U.S.
   government check for just $500,000 (combining life
   insurance with a “death gratuity”) — far less than the
   typical amount paid by insurance companies for the
   death of a young person in a car accident. The stark
   “budgetary cost” of $500,000 is clearly only a fraction
   of the total cost society pays for the loss of life –
   and no one can ever really compensate the families.
   Moreover, disability pay seldom provides adequate
   compensation for wounded troops or their families.
   Indeed, in one out of five cases of seriously injured
   soldiers, someone in their family has to give up a job
   to take care of them.

   But beyond this is the cost to the already sputtering
   U.S. economy. All told, the bill for the Iraq war is
   likely to top $3 trillion. And that’s a conservative
   estimate.

   President Bush tried to sell the American people on the
   idea that we could have a war with little or no
   economic sacrifice. Even after the United States went
   to war, Bush and Congress cut taxes, especially on the
   rich — even though the United States already had a
   massive deficit. So the war had to be funded by more
   borrowing. By the end of the Bush administration, the
   cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the
   cumulative interest on the increased borrowing used to
   fund them, will have added about $1 trillion to the
   national debt.

   The long-term burden of paying for the conflicts will
   curtail the country’s ability to tackle other urgent
   problems, no matter who wins the presidency in
   November. Our vast and growing indebtedness inevitably
   makes it harder to afford new health-care plans, make
   large-scale repairs to crumbling roads and bridges, or
   build better-equipped schools. Already, the escalating
   cost of the wars has crowded out spending on virtually
   all other discretionary federal programs, including the
   National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug
   Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency,
   and federal aid to states and cities, all of which have
   been scaled back significantly since the invasion of
   Iraq.

   To make matters worse, the U.S. economy is facing a
   recession. But our ability to implement a truly
   effective economic-stimulus package is crimped by
   expenditures of close to $200 billion on the two wars
   this year alone and by a skyrocketing national debt.

   The United States is a rich and strong country, but
   even rich and strong countries squander trillions of
   dollars at their peril. Think what a difference $3
   trillion could make for so many of the United States’
   – or the world’s — problems. We could have had a
   Marshall Plan to help desperately poor countries,
   winning the hearts and maybe the minds of Muslim
   nations now gripped by anti-Americanism. In a world
   with millions of illiterate children, we could have
   achieved literacy for all — for less than the price of
   a month’s combat in Iraq. We worry about China’s
   growing influence in Africa, but the upfront cost of a
   month of fighting in Iraq would pay for more than
   doubling our annual current aid spending on Africa.

   Closer to home, we could have funded countless schools
   to give children locked in the underclass a shot at
   decent lives. Or we could have tackled the massive
   problem of Social Security, which Bush began his second
   term hoping to address; for far, far less than the cost
   of the war, we could have ensured the solvency of
   Social Security for the next half a century or more.

   Economists used to think that wars were good for the
   economy, a notion born out of memories of how the
   massive spending of World War II helped bring the
   United States and the world out of the Great
   Depression. But we now know far better ways to
   stimulate an economy — ways that quickly improve
   citizens’ well-being and lay the foundations for future
   growth. But money spent paying Nepalese workers in Iraq
   (or even Iraqi ones) doesn’t stimulate the U.S. economy
   the way that money spent at home would — and it
   certainly doesn’t provide the basis for long-term
   growth the way investments in research, education or
   infrastructure would.

   Another worry: This war has been particularly hard on
   the economy because it led to a spike in oil prices.
   Before the 2003 invasion, oil cost less than $25 a
   barrel, and futures markets expected it to remain
   around there. (Yes, China and India were growing by
   leaps and bounds, but cheap supplies from the Middle
   East were expected to meet their demands.) The war
   changed that equation, and oil prices recently topped
   $100 per barrel.

   While Washington has been spending well beyond its
   means, others have been saving — including the oil-
   rich countries that, like the oil companies, have been
   among the few winners of this war. No wonder, then,
   that China, Singapore and many Persian Gulf emirates
   have become lenders of last resort for troubled Wall
   Street banks, plowing in billions of dollars to shore
   up Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and other firms that burned
   their fingers on subprime mortgages. How long will it
   be before the huge sovereign wealth funds controlled by
   these countries begin buying up large shares of other
   U.S. assets?

   The Bush team, then, is not merely handing over the war
   to the next administration; it is also bequeathing deep
   economic problems that have been seriously exacerbated
   by reckless war financing. We face an economic downturn
   that’s likely to be the worst in more than a quarter-
   century.

   Until recently, many marveled at the way the United
   States could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on
   oil and blow through hundreds of billions more in Iraq
   with what seemed to be strikingly little short-run
   impact on the economy. But there’s no great mystery
   here. The economy’s weaknesses were concealed by the
   Federal Reserve, which pumped in liquidity, and by
   regulators that looked away as loans were handed out
   well beyond borrowers’ ability to repay them.
   Meanwhile, banks and credit-rating agencies pretended
   that financial alchemy could convert bad mortgages into
   AAA assets, and the Fed looked the other way as the
   U.S. household-savings rate plummeted to zero.

   It’s a bleak picture. The total loss from this economic
   downturn — measured by the disparity between the
   economy’s actual output and its potential output — is
   likely to be the greatest since the Great Depression.
   That total, itself well in excess of $1 trillion, is
   not included in our estimated $3 trillion cost of the
   war.

   Others will have to work out the geopolitics, but the
   economics here are clear. Ending the war, or at least
   moving rapidly to wind it down, would yield major
   economic dividends.

   As we head toward November, opinion polls say that
   voters’ main worry is now the economy, not the war. But
   there’s no way to disentangle the two. The United
   States will be paying the price of Iraq for decades to
   come. The price tag will be all the greater because we
   tried to ignore the laws of economics — and the cost
   will grow the longer we remain.

   Reply
3. Peeved Guy says:

   September 30, 2008 at 12:52 AM

   Dude. Seriously. WTF does your copy and paste (from the WaPo for those that are interested) have anything to do with this post?

   Do you go to the Air America site and demand equal and fair coverage of McCain and copy articles from the Wall Street Journal or World Net Daily?

   Does anyone even read these things? I just skip to the end and post a rant/comment.

   Reply