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It’s a Kagan life
Among a whole cornfield of strawmen regarding why other people should die to validate his theories, Frederick "Is There Such A Thing As A 5F?" Kagan writes:
The war is consuming money that would otherwise be spent on more important domestic programs.
If only our schools were fully funded and the Air Force had to have bake-sales to buy bombers…. Well, the Air Force is just about at the bake-sale level thanks to consistent under-spending on defense since 1991. But if we stopped the war tomorrow, would our schools get all the money those who make this argument think they need? Of course not. The war is being funded on an emergency basis (for good or ill) and its cost has not been offset by tax increases (as the antiwar party periodically points out). In the real world, there is no way that even a Democratic Congress would spend $100 billion a year in non-offset emergency authorizations for education or health care, even if some war critics think that they would like it to do so. As for increasing domestic spending, those who believe that we should raise taxes and spend more money on domestic programs can still advocate that policy, whatever its wisdom. This isn’t an argument about the cost of the war — it’s an argument about whether we want to have higher taxes to pay for increased domestic spending. Alternatively, it can be an argument about the cost-benefit of government borrowing versus tax increases, or of government borrowing versus economic stimulus in the form of government spending. It is not about the one-for-one tradeoff of dollars spent on the war versus dollars spent on schools and health care.
Oddly enough Fred fails to mention the other option: increasing taxes in order to pay for the war. If forced to have a bake sale raise taxes instead of putting the war on the nations credit cards in order to pay for it, Conservatives would have us out of Iraq so fast the wind would cause Fred’s chins to swing upside his head so hard that they would knock him senseless.
Okay, more senseless.
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Hey, the war is free, schools aren’t!
I never knew that.
Vote for the Dim Angry Old Man!
I don’t care if he called his wife a cunt.
He knows the war is free.
Yay!
Yay for him!
Just add a section to our tax form. Something like if you think the Air Force needs more money for SAC even though there is no cold war add 250.00 to your tax bill and check here. Then Kagan and all his mindless minions can go crazy.
Is he trying to use “antiwar party” pejoratively? So it’s a bad thing to be against killing massive amounts of people?
Wow, Tbogg. I usually love your writing, but couldn’t you have come at this guy with something better than a fat joke? Just sayin’…there are lots of fat people who read you, too.
I like the idea of a checklist on the tax form, listing the items that the government can/can not spend your particular tax dollars on. It will probably be as wildly successful as our ballot initiative process out here in California…
On second thought, forget it.
Hmmm … actually, we DO have a pretty simple choice:
Spend $3 TRILLION — all of it on the American Credit Card — for a “war” we can never win, that is making us less safe, and is teaching a new generation how to kill.
Or a couple hundred billion to fix our infrastructure (creating many, many jobs), provide health care for all, modernize our schools, and explore new energy technologies.
The choice for Kagan is clear: piss it into the sands of the Middle East.
Is it bad I hope he gets hit by a bus? Not killed or anything. Just unable to type or speak or do much other than crap himself. That’d be fine.
Well, the Air Force is just about at the bake-sale level thanks to consistent under-spending on defense since 1991.
Obviously Clinton’s fault! I mean, he’s the one who’s been signing Defense appropriation bills for the last seven years, right?
Universal healthcare means the terrorists win.
The poster child above is perfect for the CPA/Crocker work in Iraq: well fed but totally inept, and probably going to cause us to lose the game.
I fucking *knew* we shouldn’t have let Clinton get away with pretending it was a “surplus”. I know it was irresistible, what with the Reagan years having driven us into a deep, deep hole, but it was also short-sighted in a way that’s so far killed more people than even I thought it would.
Look, during the Reagan years, we cut the fuck out of social and infrastructure spending. We “had to”, because we were running up these massive deficits trying to spend the Soviets into oblivion. So kids lost their health care, and bridges lost their maintenance budgets, and there was a general belt-tightening all around for everybody but the rich, which we as a nation politely pretended not to notice.
So the Clintons inherited both the deficits and the atrophied domestic spending, and as the economy improved put the influx of taxes into black ink and pretended it was a surplus, rather than going back and funding all those programs we had on life support.
Sure, it looked good to say the democratic president gave us a surplus after the republicans went on a spending orgy, but it only made things worse.
You’ve got a four person family, let’s say, and they’re making ends meet. They’ve got some credit card debt, they’ve got a little in savings (because they’re typical Americans and don’t know how to do the math on that). They can buy food and shoes for the kids and when the roof starts to leak they can get it fixed, but they don’t replace the car before they have to and they don’t replace it with a luxury model. A normal family, then.
Junior, one night, gets loaded at a party and drives his friend’s car into their picture window. Now the family has debts, serious debts, that they have to make good on. They work something out with Junior’s friend’s parents, and they go over the family budget again, and they tighten it some more–no more vacation to the waterpark, generic mac and cheese at the store, used shoes for a while–and as part of this they find themselves talking to the roofer and the dentist and the doctor and the vet and asking if there’s a possibility they can pay off the bills over time. They all say okay, there’s not really much else to do here. Better to get a little when you can than nothing at all.
Eight years later, a lot of scrimping and saving, a lot of overtime, maybe a promotion, Junior’s been forced to get a job and pay part of his income to the family budget, and they’re just about back to where they were. They can afford new shoes again, they can eat out a couple times a month. They can even pay off the roofer and the dentist and the doctor and the vet with the little bit of money that wasn’t part of the budget. They understand that this isn’t “extra money”, it’s money that once upon a time was committed to certain debts, and needs to go there.
Now, if our hypothetical family is sane, they do that. If, on the other hand, they’re republicans, they hear Dad call this money a “surplus”, stick to the schedule they’ve worked out, and spend it all on a Hummer for Junior while telling him he can keep his paychecks now.
This was predictable. And so are the people Junior has run over with his brand new road monster, and so is the family dog dying because the vet can’t afford to treat him for a pittance anymore. Less predictable is the roofer’s daughter dying of staph because he hasn’t been paid properly for years and couldn’t keep up the health insurance he had been carrying, but that’s kind of the problem. Irresponsibility ripples out, and it all starts with a stupid attitude that since some programs can *apparently* make do on less money, that it’s okay to leave them that way as long as you yourself never see the actual effects of it.
Neither Dad nor Fred Kagan, nor especially Junior, should ever be in the position to make these decisions. They are not responsible. And people die.
Shorter Frederick Kagan: “Taking out a student loan and watching your finances is a terrible idea. Maxing out your credit cards on expensive clothes, dining out, and other crap you don’t need is what you REALLY should be doing.”
So, it doesn’t matter if we waste a few trillion in Iraq because we wouldn’t have spent it wisely anyway?