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

To: puborectalis who wrote (747085)	10/16/2013 4:20:49 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Recommended By TideGlider Respond to of 1580442

and we should set aside monies to pay for the wars we get into. How would that work? Federal spending is federal spending. If you break it up in to a bunch of different buckets (one of which for wars), it doesn't change anything unless you change the amount the government brings in or spends. That's true even with past wars (the big ones like WWI, WWII, or the medium sized ones like Korea and Vietnam, not every tiny conflict the US ever gets involved in) where the spending was much higher a percentage of federal spending. The fight in Iraq, while very expensive, was much smaller as a portion of federal spending (and to a lesser extent as a portion of the economy). Looking at the actual amount spent its something like a trillion, over a period of time where the US federal government spent something like $27tril. and governments on all levels in the US spent almost $50tril. Also going in to a war you don't know how much its going to cost, so you wouldn't know how much to set aside. And practically setting aside money wouldn't do anything. It would just mean the government borrows more upfront but then puts some of it in some special account. Hopefully that account would earn as high of return as the interest rate the feds pay for the debt. If not your just increasing the deficit even more.