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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (26387)	2/25/2008 12:11:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Possibly they might continue that long in an 'unaltered' state... and quite possibly they WOULD NOT. They may very well be altered. But even altered the cost is likely to go up rapidly in nominal, and perhaps in real, dollar terms. But no financial projections for government programs over the expanse of CENTURIES can be considered to have much actual predictive validity. The predictions would be very uncertain, but their error could be to the downside not the upside. Also I was using these high costs to illustrate a point. As I pointed out in the end of my post, even limit the projection to decades not centuries, and use real dollars rather than nominal and Iraq is still tiny in comparison. Certainly none of the 'war costs' that I discussed were ever projected over anything near as long as 'centuries'. Exactly because the war will be over. Meanwhile entitlement spending will likely continue at least if the US continues without an extreme transformation. And much of the costs won't even continue in the decades range (only interest and medical care, and not all of the medical care) since the longest two line items I brought up were interest on the war debt Which reminds me. In my previous calculation I didn't include interest on the spending for these programs. I think I should. I'm fairly sure you will object, saying "these programs pay for themselves". But not in any way that's useful in the real world. The tax is a cost they impose on people. The spending is a separate thing from the tax. In terms of how much it contributes to the deficits, and debt, and interest on the debt I would treat every federal dollar spent equally. interest on the war debt - which is limited to the weighted average lifespan of the government bonds sold to incur it. Not really, it gets rolled over. This actually strengthens your argument (because it increases the total eventual cost) but it doesn't strengthen your argument enough to be meaningful , if it makes it "ten times stronger" it still falls way short. And interest is complex, because yes the debt is likely to get rolled over, but it could in fact be paid down instead, and should the cost of current action be calculated based on future fiscal policy? It might be more reasonable to subtract the interest from all calculations along these lines.