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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (217377)	2/4/2005 9:44:50 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572501

THE WAR RACKETS BUDGET: As Lt. Gen. Smedley Butler commented: "War is just a racket." He's right, of course. Here's a review of real military spending in the U.S. as of FY 2002: independent.org Unlike others on the thread, I do feel that inclusion of such items as interest on the portion of the national debt ascribed to huge deficit spending on military procurement in the past is quite legitimate from an accountancy point-of-view. As Mr. Higgs points out in his analysis, in FY 2002, fully $138 Billion could be ascribed to blatant mis-management of national expenditures for war over the years. We really did pay out that money. It really resulted from debts incurred largely to create the huge weapons buildup of the 1980s and 1990s. There's nothing artificial about that $138 Billion expense. We can see it in 12 active navy aircraft carrier "Strike Forces". We can see it in grotesquely destructive B-2 bombers*. We can see it in billions of dollars worth of destroyed tanks, armed personnel carriers, transports and humvees littering the Iraqi countryside. The waste is real, and the interest that we are forced to pay year after year "from here to eternity" is real. Citizens, never forget, debt is a form of enslavement. ________________________________ *In both the sense that this death-machine carries phenomenal ordinance raining death on civilians across much of the planet, and in the sense that the debt imposed on us is crushing the hopes of the citizens of the U.S. for a better and more prosperous life in the future.

To: Road Walker who wrote (217377)	2/4/2005 10:38:33 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572501

These folks even count the interest on the debt generated from defense. If you look at it that way you would have to add the interest on the debt generated from non defense spending so it should pretty much be a wash. Defense used to be a much bigger percentage of our spending, however over much of that time (except periods of time like the World Wars and the Civil War) we didn't have deficits or had small deficits. While in theory it make sense to include the debt when calculating these figures it complicates things, and probably allows for some extra manipulation, while not noticeably changing the balance without the use of manipulation. I don't think it is counted in the raw numbers. Budget figures for the Dept. of Defense, The Department of Health ect. don't include the level of debt from prior years spending. Tim