| fighter said: Mafoo, according to you, what would be the consequences if : 1/ the US hadn't spent billionas entering into war with Irak and occupying it 2/ there had been no spending to stimulate the economy |
I can only answer what I think would have happened economical, as it's extremely hard to know foreign policy wise.
1. Not much yet. economically, we didn't spend that much in the grand scheme of things. Because we were in a war (not saying we should have been), we spent money on things we needed. Spending money on required services is a good thing actually. The only time it's bad, is when you can't afford it. We can't afford in, but we have not paid that price yet. Once everything come crashing down (and it will), you can look at the 10's of trillions worth of debt that caused it, and contribute the 700-800 billion we spent that we didn't have towards that fall.
2. The biggest issue with the spending bill we have done both with Bush in his last year, and Obama sense, is that how we spent it made things worse, not better. GM should be gone. Chrysler should be gone. Goldman Sachs should be gone. 100's of banks that operated at high risk, should have been forced to pay the price for that risk.
Instead, they have been rewarded for there risky behavior. Same with many other companies. When the Government tries to game the market, what they do in the end never works. It never has.
What do I think would have happened? We would have gone to a 15% unemployment in less then a year, and hundreds of companies would have failed. But then we would be on a path of growth. Real growth, because every company succeeding, was doing do because they had a product or service that people needed. There would be nothing artificial about it. People who still had there jobs, would know they were very secure in them. They would spend money. Today, even people with jobs don't want to buy a house or car, because they don't know if they will have a job in 6 months. Hell, it's hard to get a loan, because the banks don't know if your going to have a job either.
Time is money, and the longer we try and keep from crashing, the longer we lose that time. We would be trillions better if we crashes as fast as we can, and climb up. Far better then taking 10 years to crash, like we are on the path to doing. That's 9 less years of prosperity.
