Slowly, the anti-war right is gaining momentum. Jason Chaffetz, a freshman Republican congressman from Utah, says it’s time to bring the troops home from Afghanistan.
Good for him.
I see several good reasons for a different policy in Afghanistan.
- You cannot claim to be a fiscal conservative and support expensive and deficit-busting nation-building exercises overseas. Spending and the deficit are our biggest threats right now — they trump every other concern until we get the deficit back to a manageable level.
- Afghanistan is where empires go to die. See: Soviet Union and the mighty British empire.
- Ron Paul makes an excellent argument, which is to look at the Chinese foreign policy, which is based on investing overseas peacefully. The Chinese are winning that battle.
- I can’t see a realistic exit strategy from Afghanistan. How and when do we declare victory and leave?
Let me address another concern up-front: I was a big supporter of the Iraq war. Given the realities of the evidence available in 2003, I think most people were. It was a mistake. Speaking as a fiscal conservative, I should have listened to the few voices on the right warning about the cost. Whether or not it was right morally, it was a mistake fiscally, and I did not realize that until this year.
Hopefully anti-war voices on the left and right can unite to reverse our current course in Afghanistan.
One other point: I still don’t think President Obama bears the majority of the blame for our Middle East adventures. In this particular case, he is dealing with the hand he was dealt by the Bush administration. I wish he would take another course in Afghanistan and announce a new doctrine of non-interference in the Middle East (based on fiscal concerns at the very least), but to lay all the blame at his feet is to ignore reality. Let’s hope he changes course in 2010.
Brian,
Hey man, we can’t have our cake and eat it too. If we wish to wage war, we must raise taxes to pay for said war. Right? If we wish to use an economic stimulus, we will eventually have to pay for that with taxes. If we wish to bail out certain industries in order to save the overall economy, eventually we will have to pay for that with taxes. Honestly I don’t know where conservatives get this aversion to taxation from. While reducing taxes to an extent does actually bring in more revenue, that system is subject to the law of diminishing, and eventually negative, returns. There comes a point where if you reduce taxation levels too much, you will no longer have enough funds to manage the programs you have. This should be painfully evident with the events since Bush’s 2001 tax cut. If the idea is true that reducing tax levels brings more revenue to the government, then when Bush’s tax cut went into effect, more revenue should have come into the government’s coffers. But sadly that never happened. Because it just is not true. Now, back in the 1980s, yes when Reagan cut taxes to 50% for the richest Americans that brought in more revenue. Well, that is clear. Taxing the richest Americans at 75% or even 94% (which is where it was during WWII) is obviously way too high—though under the circumstances, that is justifiable. That generation of Americans realized they needed to pay down their debts due to a war not of choice (WWII). Since the 1980s, Americans have been fed this notion that we can have our cake and eat it too. Thus we’ve grown fat and in debt. It is doubly painful, but sadly we need to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans again in order to manage our funds appropriately. Otherwise we will be bankrupting our country. And we need to stop waging wars around the world. And we need to cut down some of our domestic expenses too. Obama’s health care bill actually does this. The CBO report indicates that Obama’s health care bill pays for itself AND reduces some of the current costs. That sounds like something fiscal conservatives should appreciate.
Dan, I was referring in particular to the cost of the war on Afghanistan. However, $120 billion a year for both wars looks relatively small compared to spending $800 billion in a single year for something as transparently rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul-ish as the stimulus package.
That is $120 billion out of ~$2.5 trillion budget for those years. Well within the realm of reasonable repayment. We paid the enormous WWII debt after all, and it certainly wasn’t passed onto the next generation in any substantive sense. What percentage of people don’t expect to live thirty more years?
The sad thing about all this stuff is not that we are passing the debt onto our children. We each will suffer personally for our collective profligacy.
I wouldn’t normally call treasury bonds “money”, by the way, they are bonds, or notes receivable that we will have to redeem in actual money derived from future taxes. Unless we do something as suicidal as print our way out of debt.
The CBO report indicates that Obama’s health care bill pays for itself AND reduces some of the current costs.
Pays for itself (in federal budgetary terms) by raising taxes, and playing games with the numbers like taxing people for ten years to pay for five. The real ongoing cost is not quite so rosy.
Furthermore, we could just cut to the chase and have the government spend all our money. That would pay for itself too. Or instead of having the government spend it, we could just have the government tell *us* how to spend it. In CBO terms, telling people what they have to spend their money on has no cost at all(!).