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August 19, 2009
E-mail a friendYOUNG VOICES
Think of the Children!
In the course of debate between my Young Voices teammate, Jeremy, and I over health care in America, an interesting point came up. Are we spending too much money on the War on Terror and not enough on domestic entitlement programs?
There seems to be a major misconception floating around about where our hard-earned tax dollars are spent. While anti-war protesters demand that we move money earmarked for the war to health care, they fail to understand the reality of the cost of "free" health care.
According to a well known and highly respected economist, Joseph Stiglitz, the United States will pay a total of $2.2 trillion on the War on Terror between 2003 and 2015. That sounds like a lot of money. Yet, it is dwarfed by the increasing size of the United States economy.
The annual GDP (gross domestic product) of the United States has reached an incredible $13 trillion a year, which would easily make it affordable for us to fight more than one small war. And, despite the amount of news coverage devoted to them, Niall Ferguson of The Wall Street Journal writes that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are small in comparison to World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War as a percent of GDP.
Ferguson explains that In a comparison with any other decade in which the United States has gone to war, President Bush has kept the defense budget remarkably low. In the 60s, 8.4% of the U.S. GDP was used for defense, in the 70s it was 5.6%, in the 80s it was 5.7%, and under Bush it is only 3.6%. In fact, Ferguson suggests that our failure to secure Iraq and Afghanistan may be because we have not spent enough money to be victorious.
Obviously, you can't put a dollar sign on the human cost of war. But, when we are pointing the finger of financial irresponsibility at the Bush Administration, there are many better examples of waste than the War on Terror.
To suggest that the War on Terror will leave our children and their children in debt is blatantly false. Everyone loves children, and to say that President Bush is choosing to fight an unpopular war and funnel the extra cash into his cronies is a misrepresentation of exactly where money is being funneled. What will leave future generations in the hole is increasing entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and even a program that is meant to help children, SCHIP.