Some People Like Ron Paul

Buy an ad on DigitalJournal.com

Robert Scheer, a contributing editor to The Nation and editor of Truthdig.com, says Ron Paul “shames the leading Democrats, who prattle on about needed domestic programs that will never find funding because of future war-related government debt.”

America’s overall defense budget is, today, double what it was at the end of the Cold War, when George Bush senior was sitting in the Oval office. The irony is that America is exceeding cold war spending levels, spending trillions of dollars, but not even fighting a military sophisticated enemy. They don’t have a lot to show for all the coin they’ve spent. Osama Bin Laden is likely still smoking hash somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan, oil is almost at $100 a barrel and the American economy is looking like it’s headed for a recession, thanks to the credit crunch.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul wants to downsize government. He’s a libertarian, after all. He can think of a number of different ways to spend trillions of dollars. America has got a lot of problems at home that need attention, including millions of people without health care and a crumbling infrastructure.

Paul makes a good point – for what the Iraq war is costing America, each American family of four could be presented with a cheque for $46,000. That’s $3,000 more than the median household income in his Texas district.

Paul asks: "What about the impact of those costs on education, the very thing that so often helps to increase earnings? In fact, $46,000 would cover 90 per cent of the tuition costs to attend a four-year public university in Texas for both children in that family of four. But, instead of sending kids to college, too often we're sending them to Iraq, where the best news in a long time is they [the insurgents] aren't killing our men and women as fast as they were last month."

Robert Scheer chides the Democrats for having a libertarian Republican remind them of the opportunity costs of a war that most Democrats in Congress voted for.

Many will, and already have, dismissed Paul’s claims about how much America’s wars in the Middle East will actually cost. You can throw Paul’s figures out the window if you like, for whatever reason you have, but the Joint Economic Committee in Congress (JEC) came up with similar numbers. The long-term costs of the war on terror are staggering.

The White House, surprise-surprise, is not happy with the methods used by the JEC. In their estimates, the JEC has used the costs of long-term care of wounded soldiers and the interest to be paid on the debt financing of the war. I, for one, think the JEC is right in that decision. Those are part and parcel of the true costs of the war on terror. The JEC concluded that "almost 10 per cent of total federal government interest payments in 2008 will consist of payments on the Iraq debt accumulated so far."

In the last five years, the Bush Administration has demanded, not asked, for $804 billion. It’s so large a number it’s hard to even register.

Scheer really makes it hit home when he writes that “Bush has asked for an additional $196 billion in supplementary aid for his wars, which is $60 billion more than the total spent by the US government last year on all of America's infrastructure repairs, the National Institutes of Health, college tuition assistance and the SCHIP program to provide health insurance to kids who don't have any.”

The reality is this: the tab for the Iraq war would have paid to insure all the 47 million uninsured Americans over the past six years.

Scheer asks a most-vital question: How come that choice -- war in Iraq or full medical coverage for all Americans -- was never presented to the American people by the Democrats and Republicans who voted for this war and continue to finance it?

The JEC also stated in a report that “maintaining post-surge troop levels in Iraq over the next ten years would result in costs of $4.5 trillion.” That is a lot of money. A whole lot of money.

There’s been a lot of talk about Ron Paul on DigitalJournal.com recently, but he’s definitely got a fan in Robert Scheer.

“Until the leading Democratic candidate (Hillary Clinton) faces up to the irreparable harm that will be done to needed social programs over the next decades by the red-ink spending she supported, I will be cheering for the libertarian Republican. At least he won't throw more money down some foreign rat hole.”