By Ezra Klein
From the WASHINGTON POST:
Let’s get one thing straight: Wars cost money. Even the small ones. Already, the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars firing tomahawk missiles into Libya. Analysts say that the total price tag for the operation, if everything goes well and there’s no escalation, could easily exceed a billion dollars. That’s peanuts compared with our $3.8 trillion budget. But it’s not nothing.
A billion dollars, for instance, is more than 40 times the total NPR subsidies that inspired House Republicans to convene an emergency session of the Rules Committee to speed cuts along to the floor of Congress. That’s not to say saving the lives of Libyans isn’t a better investment than supporting “All Things Considered,” but it’s real money, and because it’s going to tomahawk missiles in Libya, it can’t go to something else.
But for more than a decade now, we’ve waged war as if it were free, keeping our wars off the budget and, rather than paying for them as they were fought, slapping them on the national credit card. Paying as you go, after all, is hard. It forces you to make decisions about competing priorities. When you don’t pay up front, those decisions become easy. And war should never be easy…
Click here to read the full article.
EDITOR: How the USA is perceived by the Arab world can make the difference in trillions spent and thousands of lives saved. Sometimes a risk must be taken and an opportunity seized.
