The Trillion-Dollar War

To distract people from the real price tag of a two-front war, the president and Congress have used an unprecedented and fiscally irresponsible budgetary trick: a series of “emergency” supplemental spending bills totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. This scheme has allowed them not only to hide the costs of the conflicts but also to avoid painful budget choices while funneling billions of dollars in unvetted goodies to favored interest groups.

After 9-11, I thought we'd send a few guys to the mid-east to infiltrate the terrorists' lair and bring them to justice. We could have done that for considerably less than $1,000,000,000,000 but we decided to go after everyone in Iraq with a beard and a whatchacallit on his head. You know, kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out. Not a very effective use of our money and manpower. We're using brute force - and a lot of money - to try to rebuild Iraq after we won the battle for Iraq. The people we're after are probably in Syria or Iran and, while we are blundering in Iraq, are preparing their next attack. Or maybe they're not even planning another attack. They couldn't have imagined the 9-11 attacks alone would have accomplished their goal of destroying the Great Satan but, with our blundering and blustering and spending our way into debt, they may not need to do anything else.