What happened to all of the doom and gloom economic threads?

[jeninflorida]

And democrats like yourself demanded bush end the war….then obama promised he would end the war. Pelosi demanded the troops be brought back home…yet we are still there and now obama will be sending more troops to Afghanistan. Oh but he promised to end the war? Hum….

Just another obama lie

and yet no democrates are demanding that obama end the war...as its obama's war now

spend baby spend....

Look what a gullible chump you are.

A recent study indicated that the long term health care costs for wounded Iraq war veterans could range from $350 billion to $700 billion.[14]

Source: Wikipedia

That's just for veteran's care.

 

[mercury14]

Wikipedia:

In a March 16, 2003 Meet the Press interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, held less than a week before the Iraq War began, host Tim Russert reported that "every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement."

 

[jeninflorida]

and there we go....you know obama lied yet you need to dig something up from 2003

Wikipedia:

In a March 16, 2003 Meet the Press interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, held less than a week before the Iraq War began, host Tim Russert reported that "every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement."

 

[mercury14]

And democrats like yourself demanded bush end the war….then obama promised he would end the war. Pelosi demanded the troops be brought back home…yet we are still there and now obama will be sending more troops to Afghanistan. Oh but he promised to end the war? Hum….

Just another obama lie

and yet no democrates are demanding that obama end the war...as its obama's war now

spend baby spend....

I was a young Captain in the USAF at the time of the war. I wasn't demanding anything of the Commander-in-Chief. I was deployed to Ali Air Base in Kuwait during the Gulf War, demanding nothing from anyone.

Every post you make is a random lie. Why is that?

 

[jeninflorida]

I was a young Captain in the USAF at the time of the war. I wasn't demanding anything of the Commander-in-Chief. I was deployed to Ali Air Base in Kuwait during the Gulf War, demanding nothing from anyone.

Every post you make is a random lie. Why is that?

I blame bush

 

[mercury14]

and there we go....you know obama lied yet you need to dig something up from 2003

Try to stay on track. You lose your focus every five seconds.

Frisco posted that he believes that the stimulus was more than the cost of the Iraq war. I countered it by saying that Veteran's health care costs alone are estimated as high as $700 billion.

So since just the health care costs from the Iraq war aren't far from the cost of the stimulus, he was fooled yet again by right wing propaganda.

 

[mercury14]

As of February 2010, around $704 billion has been spent based on estimates of current expenditure rates.

This extrapolates to about $750 billion today. The stimulus was $788 billion so it's almost there.

However that's only the direct costs. Indirect and delayed costs are MUCH higher.

Indirect and delayed costs

According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion dollars by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen.[9][10]

Stiglitz, former chief economist of the World Bank and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, has stated the total costs of the Iraq War on the US economy will be three trillion dollars in a moderate scenario, and possibly more in the most recent published study, published in March 2008.[11] Stiglitz has stated: "The figure we arrive at is more than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative assumptions...Needless to say, this number represents the cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq."

 

[mercury14]

So we have a 2-year old estimate of the Iraq War costing taxpayers about THREE TRILLION dollars. Probably more since that estimate is old.

But Frisco would rather believe that Obama's $788 billion stimulus was a greater cost. Nevermind that the facts!

 

[eyer]

"The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans -- the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed ...," Simpson said."


Culturally, we've been a socialist country for a while, now. Ditto politically. As evidenced above, it should come to no one's surprise that we are economically socialist, too...

Culture. Politics. Economics. As those three go, so is a country.

Short live the United Socialist States of America!

 

[firespin]

So we have a 2-year old estimate of the Iraq War costing taxpayers about THREE TRILLION dollars. Probably more since that estimate is old.

But Frisco would rather believe that Obama's $788 billion stimulus was a greater cost. Nevermind that the facts!

Are you always a moron? The stimulus needs to be financed also. That would bring the cost to a similar range, since the base costs are similar.

 

[mercury14]

Are you always a moron? The stimulus needs to be financed also. That would bring the cost to a similar range, since the base costs are similar.

You're confused again.

The 3 trillion figure is for the cost of the war + indirect costs + financing.

The cost of the war is estimated at about $750 billion and counting. Indirect costs (ie Veteran's healthcare) are about three times that figure. The stimulus is simply 788 billion. Financing 788 billion will not lead to a 3 trillion cost, LOL...

So you're utterly wrong. In fact, you're wrong by over two trillion dollars.




Not to mention that your party claims that tax cuts pay for themselves. 1/3 of the stimulus is tax breaks so according to your party we're only really financing about $525 billion in the stimulus. So again, this does not come to 3 trillion dollars....

And also the stimulus is an investment in the economy, meaning more people paying taxes, which lessens the cost of the stimulus.....

 

[Daehreppoc]

Unfortunately, most of the stimulus, particularly to the financial sector, went into pockets...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Look what a gullible chump you are.

A recent study indicated that the long term health care costs for wounded Iraq war veterans could range from $350 billion to $700 billion.[14] Size if the stimulus: a little under 800 billion.

Source: Wikipedia

That's just for veteran's care.

I know.


Ironic that they can't make it pay for itself they way they told us their UHC would pay for itself.

Do us all a favor. As soon as your premiums begin to drop, start a victory thread...
__________________
It is popular today to blame capitalism for everything that displeases. Indeed, who is still aware of what he would have to forego if there were no "capitalism?" When great dreams do not come true, capitalism is charged immediately. This may be a proper procedure for party politics, but in Scientific discussion, it should be avoided.
Ludwig von Mises
A Critique of Interventionalism (1929)

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

You're confused again.

The 3 trillion figure is for the cost of the war + indirect costs + financing.

The cost of the war is estimated at about $750 billion and counting. Indirect costs (ie Veteran's healthcare) are about three times that figure. The stimulus is simply 788 billion. Financing 788 billion will not lead to a 3 trillion cost, LOL...

So you're utterly wrong. In fact, you're wrong by over two trillion dollars.




Not to mention that your party claims that tax cuts pay for themselves. 1/3 of the stimulus is tax breaks so according to your party we're only really financing about $525 billion in the stimulus. So again, this does not come to 3 trillion dollars....

And also the stimulus is an investment in the economy, meaning more people paying taxes, which lessens the cost of the stimulus.....

Meanwhile, as the death count and numbers of wounded rise in Afghanistan where Obama is steadfastly wiping out al Qaeda, al Qaeda has sent its people from Somalia to Uganda to kill Americans...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

"The commission leaders said that, at present, federal revenue is fully consumed by three programs: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. "The rest of the federal government, including fighting two wars, homeland security, education, art, culture, you name it, veterans -- the whole rest of the discretionary budget is being financed ...," Simpson said."


Culturally, we've been a socialist country for a while, now. Ditto politically. As evidenced above, it should come to no one's surprise that we are economically socialist, too...

Culture. Politics. Economics. As those three go, so is a country.

Short live the United Socialist States of America!

And WAY too many Republicans are comfortable with that as long as they get to help call the shots.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

So we have a 2-year old estimate of the Iraq War costing taxpayers about THREE TRILLION dollars. Probably more since that estimate is old.

But Frisco would rather believe that Obama's $788 billion stimulus was a greater cost. Nevermind that the facts!

Yes, it is if we want to start comparing long-term costs (I mean, you apply them to one side of the equation and not the other, that's not only bad accounting, but bad Algebra) because like a run-away credit card, we're never going to catch up on the minimum payments to our creditors and as they sense inflation when we print more money, they're simply going to raise the interest rates on the money we have to borrow to cover the vigorish...

You really aren't all that bright when it comes to basic economics.
__________________
If you still have a job, it was "saved." If you don't have a job, it's being "created."
A_J, the Incredulous

 

[firespin]

You're confused again.

The 3 trillion figure is for the cost of the war + indirect costs + financing.

The cost of the war is estimated at about $750 billion and counting. Indirect costs (ie Veteran's healthcare) are about three times that figure. The stimulus is simply 788 billion. Financing 788 billion will not lead to a 3 trillion cost, LOL...

So you're utterly wrong. In fact, you're wrong by over two trillion dollars.




Not to mention that your party claims that tax cuts pay for themselves. 1/3 of the stimulus is tax breaks so according to your party we're only really financing about $525 billion in the stimulus. So again, this does not come to 3 trillion dollars....

And also the stimulus is an investment in the economy, meaning more people paying taxes, which lessens the cost of the stimulus.....

Too many mistakes to take all of them on, but for openers, here's the interest charge:

"CBO estimated that interest costs alone from 2001-2017 could total more than $700 billion."

So you'd need to include that for the stimulus as well. You have to finance tax cuts as well as expenses because the tax cuts mean that some other expenditure is now being put on the credit card.

Most of the costs of the war actually go to pay somebody for some product or service, so the people paying taxes argument is no different than for the stimulus.

And ("but wait, there's more...") the CBO report was made before the updated forecast of troop strength. They assume we'd still above 75,000 troops until 2013. Oops.

You keep shifting between "Iraq" and "Iraq plus Afghanistan"...Oh, snap!

And the guy who comes up with $3T only does that by making estimates of the total cost to society of $7 millions per person killed. This is a crazy way to calculate the cost of something. Imagine if we did that with the 1 million abortions annually. We'd have a total abortion cost of $7 trillion annually. Do you really want to go there?

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

The d and the g are close together...



I think you meant 'go there.'

Whoops, you already caught that.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Signs of the Times

Thomas Sowell
NRO

If you could spend vast amounts of other people’s money just by saying a few magic words, wouldn’t you be tempted to do it? Barack Obama has spent hundreds of billions of dollars of the taxpayers’ money just by using the magic words “stimulus” and “jobs.”

It doesn’t matter politically that the stimulus is not actually stimulating and that the unemployment rate remains up near double-digit levels, despite all the spending and all the rhetoric about jobs. And of course nothing negative will ever matter to those who are part of the Obama cult, including many in the media.

...

How can you pour trillions of dollars into the economy and not even see the price level go up significantly? Economists have long known that it is not just the amount of money, but also the speed with which it circulates, that affects the price level.

Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the velocity of circulation of money in the American economy had plummeted to its lowest level in half a century. Money that people don’t spend does not cause inflation. It also does not stimulate the economy.

The current issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek has a feature article about businesses that are just holding onto huge sums of money. They say, for example, that the pharmaceutical company Pfizer is holding on to $26 billion. If so, there should not be any great mystery as to why Pfizer doesn’t invest it.

With the Obama administration being on an anti-business kick, boasting of putting its foot on some business’s neck, and the president talking about putting his foot on another part of the anatomy — and with Congress coming up with more and more red tape, more mandates, and more heavy-handed interventions in businesses — would you risk $26 billion that you might not even be able to get back, much less make any money on the deal?

Pfizer is not unique. Banks have cut back on lending, despite all the billions of dollars that were dumped into them in the name of “stimulus.” Consumers have also cut back on spending.

For the first time, more gold is being bought as an investment to be held as a hedge against a currently non-existent inflation than is being bought by the makers of jewelry. There may not be any inflation now, but eventually that money is going to start moving, and so will the price level.

...

One of the little-noticed signs of what is going on has been the increase in the employment of temporary workers. Businesses have been increasingly meeting their need for labor by hiring temporary workers and working their existing employees overtime, instead of hiring new people.

Why? Because temporary workers usually don’t get health insurance or other benefits, and working existing employees overtime doesn’t add to the cost of their benefits.

There is no free lunch — and the biggest price of all is paid by people who are unemployed because politicians cannot leave the economy alone to recover, as the American economy has repeatedly recovered faster when left alone than when politicians decided that they have to “do something.”

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Time for Something Completely Different

Rich Lowrey
NRO

What were the policies that created this mess? Obama assails the Bush tax cuts, although he wants to retain them for families making less than $250,000 a year. In fact, Obama brags about his own prowess as a tax-cutter. “We cut taxes — didn’t raise them, we cut them — for 95 percent of working families and small-business owners,” he boasted in Missouri.

There’s no theory for why tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003 would have caused a housing crash in 2007 and 2008. Perhaps it was the tax cuts for savings and investment? But Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was on CNBC the other day saying that the administration doesn’t want rates on capital gains and dividends — now 15 percent — to rise above 20 percent; this was part of his ongoing my-boss-really-doesn’t-hate-business tour.

Did the Bush tax cuts fuel the deficit? In 2007, the budget deficit was a puny $160 billion. It’s true that George W. Bush handed over a recession-bloated deficit of more than a trillion dollars to Obama, but deficits are better than surpluses in a weak economy, according to Obama’s boosters. Obama added as much new deficit spending as he plausibly could as quickly as possible, and still wants more.

Maybe the lax regulation of Wall Street was blameworthy? The key piece of financial deregulation was negotiated between then-senator Phil Gramm and then–Treasury secretary Larry Summers — now a key Obama official — and signed by Bill Clinton in 1999. It’s a stretch to blame this bipartisan, pre-Bush legislation for the crisis, which had the housing bubble and bust at its root.

Maybe the regulators were asleep at the switch? Yes, the economy’s most important regulator, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, kept interest rates too low for too long. Obama has retained him as his Fed chairman. The bubble and the perilous state of the banks caught Geithner, the head of the New York Fed with direct oversight of Wall Street, flat-footed. Obama promoted him to Treasury secretary.

There’s a vein of continuity in the bailouts and stimuli, too. The Bush administration instituted TARP and began the bailout of the car companies; the Obama administration picked up where it left off. The Bush administration embraced tax rebates and tax credits to stimulate the economy; so has the Obama administration.

On several fronts, it’s the sheer magnitude of the Obama agenda that constitutes its radicalism, not its direction. In Missouri, Obama touted subsidies to green energy as his forward-looking economic development agenda, as if the landscape weren’t already littered with such programs. BP alone gets $600 million in subsidies for ethanol. That’s the former wonder-fuel that has proven both uneconomical and unenvironmental.

The new departure in American politics is represented by the tea partiers. They are hell on lawmakers who voted for the bailouts; they consider both Bush and Obama spending anathema; and they have endorsed candidates who have said things about entitlements — the driver of our long-term deficits — that no establishment Republican or Democrat would ever dare utter. This is something truly bold and refreshing.

Obama always talks about the "mess" he was handed but forgets to remind us that he was part of the Democrat Congress that had the lame duck Bush by the balls and, along with the Democrat Paulson, was in control of spending and budgets...

So when he wants the people who created the mess to shut the fuck up, those should be the last words of his speech.

Which, btw, he delivers VERY well.

Especially the parts Zuckerman writes!

 

[cebalrai]

Meanwhile, as the death count and numbers of wounded rise in Afghanistan where Obama is steadfastly wiping out al Qaeda, al Qaeda has sent its people from Somalia to Uganda to kill Americans...

Here we go... It's Obama's fault that Al Qaeda is in Africa now!

Nevermind that they've been in Africa since Obama was a senior in high school. It's still his fault.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Here we go... It's Obama's fault that Al Qaeda is in Africa now!

Nevermind that they've been in Africa since Obama was a senior in high school. It's still his fault.

No, read Zinni's book. It's Bill Clinton's fault.

Just pointing out the irony of the guy who said we took the eye off the ball by going into Iraq not having his eyeball on where al Qaeda actually is...

It ain't in the hills of Afghanistan.

Usually it's where we ain't...

Are you saying that Obama might not have enough years under his belt to have the experience to understand what he's fighting?

I'd have to agree with that!
__________________
"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."
Sarah Palin

 

[mercury14]

No, read Zinni's book. It's Bill Clinton's fault.

Just pointing out the irony of the guy who said we took the eye off the ball by going into Iraq not having his eyeball on where al Qaeda actually is...

It ain't in the hills of Afghanistan.

Usually it's where we ain't...

Are you saying that Obama might not have enough years under his belt to have the experience to understand what he's fighting?

I'd have to agree with that!
__________________
"I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities."
Sarah Palin

Half of you dipshits think Obama was born into some Muslim sector Africa where this Al Qaeda crap is happening. Why not accuse him of being cousins with the Uganda bombers?

 

[RobDownSouth]

No, read Zinni's book. It's Bill Clinton's fault.

I read his book. He said nothing of the sort. You are a liar.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Half of you dipshits think Obama was born into some Muslim sector Africa where this Al Qaeda crap is happening. Why not accuse him of being cousins with the Uganda bombers?

Link to where I have advocated such nonsense.

This is what Liberals do when they don't have an answer in a dialog; they lash out at strawmen...