Wednesday, January 26, 2005
Editorial: One nation, under Bush, heading for bankruptcy
Trying to occupy Iraq on the cheap has made the effort costlier in the long run. So will the habit of putting the tab on Uncle Sam's credit card.
From the RoundTable blog
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Some of the money is for continued operations in Afghanistan, an outgrowth of a necessary response to the attacks of 9/11. Most of it, however, is for continued operations in Iraq, a consequence of the unnecessary and badly bungled invasion of that country. All of it, of course, is being put on Uncle Sam's increasingly overloaded credit card, as was the $200 billion previously spent in Afghanistan and Iraq.
At that, the news represents progress of sorts. Unlike last year, the administration this year at least isn't waiting until the last minute to acknowledge the obvious: Its Iraq misadventure is costing not only hundreds of precious American lives but also hundreds of billions of American dollars.
Even so, the money has yet to be included in official deficit projections for the current fiscal year. Add in the $80 billion, and the projected deficit for the year to end Sept. 30 is $448 billion, not the $368 billion forecast Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office.
Then there's the Social Security surplus, expected to run $173 billion this year, which the CBO plugs into the forecast as if it were general-fund money. Account properly for it as well, and the real operating deficit is expected to reach a record $621 billion.
There's a fiscal crisis here, all right, but it isn't with Social Security.
War costs run up by the second President Bush stand in sharp contrast to the costs of the Gulf War fought by the president's father nearly a decade and a half ago. The price tag for that war, to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, came to $61.1 billion. U.S. taxpayers, however, paid only $7.4 billion. Allies paid the rest.
Today's war costs stand in sharp contrast, too, to the administration's happy talk before the invasion about how Iraqi oil revenues would pay for everything. But, then, judging from the record of his prepolitical career, George W. Bush never did understand the oil business.
Bush may not understand, either, how badly he is driving America toward bankruptcy, but he is surely doing so nonetheless. It is occurring not only in the financial arena; deep drawdowns on the nation's military, diplomatic and moral accounts are part of the story, too.
Finances, though, offer one readily measurable way to grasp this administration's reckless disregard for common sense.
