Hey, Big Spender!

Suffering from severe war-fatigue, as every decent American and non-American, a lecture on the costs of the war in Iraq would not necessarily be on my to-do list on a sunny and warm spring afternoon. But since I rarely have the opportunity to listen to Noble prize winning economists in the comfortable proximity of my campus cinema, I opted for Joseph Stiglitz today. The title, “Three Trillion Dollar War” sounded politically provocative enough.
Democrats have been wining about the war costs ever since they realized it’s not precisely a G.H.W. Bush-style hundred-hour military project in Iraq, but in our terror-ridden world, no decent liberal candidate would actually cut back the US military budget, of course. The evil is still out there, as we know. But for some reason or another even with no defense spending cuts on the horizon, it became a daily duty of every respectable Democrat to waive the Iraq check and show how much those wild Republicans hawks are spending. Nota bene, it remains to be a Congressional responsibility to approve military spending every fiscal year and Democrats happens to have the majority of the seats since 2004. Minor detail.
Nevertheless, three trillion dollars remains a particularly supersize number even by American standards. Yes, that is exactly twelve zeros after the number 3: take Hungary’s GDP twenty times, and you got it. Or do you? The main narrative of Stiglitz was to make the econ illiterate, liberal arts audience realize the opportunity costs of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Take Health Care (long live Democratic primaries) and imagine just how much money the Federal government would have to pump into the system to cover those 60 million who are left out of the rain. Well, take one sixth of the war’s costs and you would solve the problem not only for this generation but for the next one as well. But of course not everyone agrees with universal health care, and all Americans have the right not to put a price tag on the sacred cause of democracy promotion. In the end, what conscientious parent would complain about the high tuition fee of their child’s education? Parsimony is out when it comes to educating the world and national security, magnanimity is in. The bulk of the problem, however is that financing Iraq in itself becomes a national security problem when the money lender happens to be not so democratic, not so allied China.
The real trouble with financing Iraq is that the US has not been able to finance it from the beginning. It simply did not have the bucks to back it. So as most reputable American citizens that now find themselves in the middle of an ugly housing crisis, it started to spend money that it didn’t have and hoped for better days.
Stiglitz argued that it is an urban myth that wars are good for the economy. They’re not. At least not in the long run. They create a false sense of growth that is all but sustainable. So, here they are now: living on borrowed money and borrowed time, facing a depression that is deeper and probably longer than most Americans would want to think.
America is yet to see a war to be ended due to financial concerns. To pullout because of the cash problems would be the least romantic and most un-American ending of the Freedom fairy tale. It just won’t happen. Democrats will have to find better reasons than that.