Down the Rabbit Hole ... Numbers, far, wide ... and tall

On to the Iraq War. So much of the debate is on whether or not we're "winning," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean - does the Surge work? That's a distraction. More and more, I think we're going to be hearing about the costs of the war and the impact on our economy. The cost of the war has been in the news especially just recently, with the release of the book by Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his co-author, Linda Bilmes, titled The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict and this article describing the book - The Three Trillion Dollar War.

Three Trillion Dollars - it's an astounding number...that's $3,000,000,000,000.00 ...

Ah, the power of a graphic image....we really need a graphic image when numbers get this big ... sometimes really really - really really - big numbers just lose us in their significance...let's hope more candidates in this election year start tying these two things together, because they are intertwined. The reason our economy is heading into the crapper these days is closely tied to WOT - the War, the price of Oil, and Tax breaks. Some folks out on the web are really trying though to provide relevant lessons on the truly staggering costs of the Iraq War. There's this one - $87,000,000,000.00, which stacks the $1 bills in blocks that get bigger and bigger and bigger.

Now imagine 34 of those stacks, and you are getting close to $3 Trillion...3,000 Billion.

In some ways, that stack is hard to beat .. but I'll try. This next website takes a different approach, suggesting what we could have instead of the Iraq War ... this is the tack I hope that the Democratic candidates take in their campaigns. It is truly remarkable.

So here is a depiction of $165 Billion, from an article titled Monetary Costs of the Iraq War that has a lot of other tables - I know, boring, show us more pictures.

OK. Here's a Trillion Pennies...

Perhaps the best way to understand the concept of a Trillion is to consider the US National Debt. This picture shows the debt.

For a good explanation of Deficits and Debt, see this link.

The largest sustained increase in the national debt occurred from 1980 to 1992, when it rose from $930 million to $4 trillion. Ironically, this is the period of the administrations of Ronald Reagan (1980-1988) and George H. W. Bush (1988-1992) - ironic because Republicans had long been associated in the public mind with fiscal responsibility. Indeed, President Reagan regularly spoke of "those tax-and-spend Democrats." The program of his administration was to "spend and borrow" after cutting taxes. As a result, the national debt tripled during his two terms. Yet President Reagan's strategy for igniting strong growth worked.

But it also set the national debt on a growth trajectory. The debt rose from $930 million in 1980 to $2.6 trillion in 1988. Some observers point out that this doesn't matter because after the tax cut, government tax receipts doubled from about $500 billion to $1 trillion from 1980 to 1990, due to the higher income in a growing economy. But whatever the increase in tax receipts, it clearly did not come near to covering the increase in government spending - for which each party blames the other.

And for a more current understanding of the concept of Trillions (and the impact of tax cuts for the very wealthy in a time of war spending), see this National Debt Graph. Note the trajectory of the debt, now going back UP under another GOP president, modeling the Reagan years...Indeed, it's risen dramatically, although the slope on this graph differs because it shows the debt as a percentage of gross domestic product, which is perhaps a better indicator of its real impact.

This website focuses on the connection between presidents and debt, showing that Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Bush have been the true champions at spending - so don't believe all that you hear about "Tax and Spend Liberals" ...it's the Conservatives, it would seem, who are the real kings of spending...

Finally, we're left with Tax Cuts ... the focus on cutting the tax rates at the highest brackets has resulted in a tremendous transfer of wealth over the past seven years ... this website by Citizens for Tax Justice is good: Year-by-Year Analysis of the Bush Tax Cuts Shows Growing Tilt to the Very Rich - it's pretty thick with numbers, so maybe one more picture is in order... on to the L Curve, so named because it actually looks like the mirror image of a captial L ... it uses a football field to show income disparities, placing the population along the football field yard lines, based on their annual family income, represented by the height of a stack of $100 bills. It remains relatively flat until the 95 yard line, when it begins to creep up, then it sky-rockets out of sight at the 99-yard line. So naturally, McCain's plan is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent!

According to the U.S. Treasury website, the following are recent annual additions to the U.S. public debt.

The cumulative debt of the United States in the past 5 completed fiscal years was approximately $2,767.8 billion, or about 30% of the total national debt of ~$9.25 trillion. Wikipedia on United States Public Debt

So, on to the bottom line - the conclusion of all these graphs and pictures:

We are not poor. We just make poor choices when setting our priorities.

As a body public, we've been deluded into thinking that we should must spend our money on a) War in Iraq, with no clear justification or exit plan; b) Oil imports from despotic nations with no clear strategy to break free to energy independence and alternative energy sources; and c) Tax cuts into infinity for the very wealthy, with no clear indication of why they are more deserving than the middle and lower classes.

As long as those remain our national priorities, we will continue to have little free money to invest in Infrastructure that will pay dividends for future growth - they'll be no help from Washington for local economies under this leadership. We're too busy spending the money of tomorrow's generations on today's skewed priorities - debt spending like a drunken sailor on shore leave. We've gone down the Rabbit Hole as a nation, and there's little that makes sense any more. Fiscal Conservatives have grown loopy with spending, Congressional representatives addicted to earmarks for their constituents - real financial libertines. And Social Liberals are starting to look like tightwads with public money, squeezing the budget so that they can find ways to pay for their beloved social welfare programs and progressive ideas. Which, by the way, are dwarfed by US defense spending, which now amounts to more than the rest of the world combined!

One last thing ... At current war spending levels - $10 Billion/month, which show no signs of abating, by the way - just one day of the War in Iraq costs $333 million dollars. At an average cost of $5 million per network (rough estimate for the City of San Marcos, Texas, a town of 50,000 and 25 square miles), as a nation we could build 66 city networks with just one day's war spending, and provide very cheap broadband for all 3,300,000 residents. Or if you prefer, 2,000 city networks for the cost of 30 days worth of war spending...and that's just the war costs, to say nothing of the oil spending and the tax cuts for the wealthy.

Folks, in this country, we have the money to do whatever we have the will to do, we just consistently have chosen to spend it on other things like War, Oil, and Tax Cuts, under the leadership we keep electing. We have chosen not to invest in our collective futures by building new broadband infrastructure, among a host of other constructive purposes and paths we could have taken. We're a collective mess when it comes to decision making, I'm afraid to say.

So don't believe it when people tell you "we can't afford it." They're really saying "We have different priorities."