The Surge Seems To Be Working!

Will the "Splurge"?

So how is our government treating us? In some instances, I'd say pretty good. With the selection of General Petraeus as the commander in Iraq, the President has given a godsend to the people who believe we are really in a war against Islamo-fascism. Those who don't must have plenty of Mideast sand in their teeth from burying their heads. There can be no doubt that there have been multiple mistakes since the invasion of Iraq. It's easy to run any efforts of war by looking at yesterday. "

Those who conduct a war do not have that luxury. Requirements and necessities change on a daily and sometimes an hourly basis. There is no doubt that military casualties are down. Civilian casualties are down. Suicide bombings are down. Roadside bombings are down. Security is up and people are truly beginning to go back to a semblance of normalcy. There have even been some concrete steps taken by the Iraqi Parliament.

In blood, the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, have not been costly. Even though the loss of even one warrior is a tragedy for us all, anyone who dares to look at any of our previous wars will find that it is relatively minuscule. The drive by killings in just a few of our own cities account for worse statistics of death .Notwithstanding this"positive", our loss of treasure has been obscene! We're rapidly approaching one trillion dollars in the cost of prosecuting the warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one can convince me that all this cash has gone for uniforms, bullets and diesel. Now, I'm not naive enough to think that there are not clandestine uses of money. There are bribes to informants, maybe bribes to Iraqi politicians and other erstwhile thugs of which you have to grease the grabbing palms. However, the Government Accounting Office and various comptrollers have testified publicly to the waste, fraud and abuse, especially in Iraq.

There are tens of billions of dollars that are just plain missing. When you add to this the physical evidence of shoddy construction and provable fraud, as the late Senator Everett Dirksen used to say, "You're beginning to talk about some real money!" We can't even keep our own government agencies honest. Some of them cannot even be certified by the appropriate authorities here at home. You can only imagine the abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan. Apparently, Iraq's own billions of dollars are accumulating in the United States because they can't spend it. They don't know how! What? Well, no wonder. Our cash tree has been shaking money all over Iraq. They don't need to spend their own cash for now. "

Given the previous thoughts, I believe we can imagine that probably 25% of the trillion dollars going to Iraq and Afghanistan has been for naught. So how is our government treating us? We've just noted a tremendous "splurge". So, I propose that any person engaged in improper use of U.S. Funds be charged with treason, as we are at war. Maybe that might be a deterrent! So, at least to a degree, this "splurge" has helped in making the "surge" successful.

Now we are about to undertake another "splurge". The House of Representatives has passed a stimulus package to aid our, perhaps weakening, economy. The Senate, because of all the media hype, is bound to pass it's own version and quickly reconcile it with the House and forward it to the President for his signature. The final figure will probably end up being $150-200 billion. In a nutshell, it will be similar to the following analogy. Let's say you have a business. You write yourself a check for a $1,000.00. You then go down to your store and buy $1,000.00 worth of your goods. "Duh" you see where I'm going. It doesn't seem to me we're going anywhere, except to have to make tax payments on the profits your business just made. And! Do you think we're going to pay that $200 billion back to the federal government. Hell no! So we're going to have a bigger deficit and debt. The dollar will sink lower than it already has. If the missing $250 billion dollars in Iraq hasn't paved it's street with gold, which it hasn't, how is $200 billion going to make any difference in an economy the size of ours?

Let us examine words recently written by the learned Thomas Sowell. He writes, “Both political parties seem determined that the federal government should create a "stimulus package" of things designed to cushion a downturn in the economy. That alone should be enough to make us remember that "the devil is always in the details," because things that are bipartisan are often twice as bad as things that are partisan. A bipartisan intervention is virtually guaranteed to be a grab bag of inconsistent policies thrown together in order to get the votes of people with contradictory ideas of what ought to be done. The idea of a stimulus package is based on the general notion that there are things the government could do to make things better in the economy. Unfortunately, there is a vast difference between what the government could do and what it is likely to do. Economists can give you all sorts of scenarios in which government intervention could make things better, whether when fighting off a recession, regulating domestic markets or controlling international trade. Some people even believe that whenever there is "market failure," the government ought to step in. Of course markets can fail. Everything human can fail. But if Alex Rodriguez strikes out, do the Yankees take him out of the game and send in a pinch hitter for him?

No one would dream of suggesting such a thing. We are far more rational when discussing sports than when discussing politics. The fact that the market is not doing what we wish it would do is no reason to automatically assume that the government would do better. There are too many examples of government interventions that made things worse, the Great Depression of the 1930s being the most tragic. Those on the left love to believe that the stock market crash of 1929 showed the failure of the free market and that the New Deal interventions in the 1930s saved the day. But the stock market crash of 1987 was just as big and Ronald Reagan resisted loud calls for him to intervene. The result was not another Great Depression but the beginning of a decades-long period of prosperity.”

Let's face it, markets go up and markets go down. They have since the beginning of markets. The tulips in Holland come to mind. The “exuberance” in the markets expressed by former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. And now, the greed by the lenders and the borrowers in the “sub-prime” market. It should be a crime to even have a “sub-prime” market. That in itself is bad paper and it shouldn't even exist. So, how is our government treating us? It has given us too much of things we'll never be able to pay for. I hope it will stop!