fordy said:
Interesting that the trillions spent on the wars doesn't show up until 2009....I wonder why that is..... http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/02/weighing-the-ir/ Oh of course! Bush circumvented counting the war in the deficit by classing it as an "emergency spending measure" until Obama outlawed it. Keep telling yourself that Republicans help the budget. Let's see how that goes... |
The "trillions spent on the wars doesn't show up until 2009." because you're reading the graph wrong ...
The cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars aren't included in the deficits for any president, and in 2010 were still external to the budget. Even then the total cost of the Iraq war in 2010 was estimate at $700 Billion spread over 7 years (so you can add roughly $100 Billion per year from 2003 to 2010), and the total cost of the Afghanistan war was estimated at $350 Billion spread over 9 years (so you can add roughly $40 Billion per year from 2001 to 2010).
The "Spike" in the budget was primarily caused by massive spending increases that were designed to stimulate the economy; as is always the case with Keynesian economics, the spending did not have the results people expected and the excuses are that there wasn't enough money and that it wasn't spent early enough.
Don't get me wrong, the Republican's are terrible managers of but they're far more credible when it comes to reducing the deficit than the Democrats are. In spite of all of the Rhetoric, the Democrats aren't even willing to freeze government spending are would never offer anything that approaches real cuts in spending; and the revenue they anticipate gaining from the tax increases they want is unrealistically optimistic.
