Iraq or the Economy?--Ron Paul

[Frenchy]

Iraq or the Economy?
"All war, but most particularly war funded by monetary inflation, bleeds a country in multiple ways. Obviously, many of the young people who are in the military literally give their blood, and sometimes their lives, fighting in wars of this type. Meanwhile, those who do not fight the war, but fund it, are forced to pay both the immediate costs, as well as seeing their long term purchasing power erode, as the twin pillars of debt and inflation are foisted upon the backs of current taxpayers and future generations. Neither conspiracy nor coincidence explains steep increases in the price of gas as the war drags on. No, this is simply a reality of the inflationary policies that, among other things, make this war possible."
Click here for the full article: http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2008/tst061608.htm

[Judge]

What paul is too stupid to understand is that this war is relatively, by any objective standard, cheap and is not a severe cost.

There are domestic programs that are costing and will cost greatly more and yeild much less significant results.

He's still an idiot extraordinare.

[Delija]

Originally Posted by Judge

What paul is too stupid to understand is that this war is relatively, by any objective standard, cheap and is not a severe cost.

A joke Judge? Three trillion dollars is "cheap"? "Not a severe cost"?

Originally Posted by Judge

There are domestic programs that are costing and will cost greatly more and yeild much less significant results.

.

Care to point out an example? Just one would be adequate. Yet you make it sound as if there are a multitude of such programs.

TIA


Peace,
D.

[AZXD]

Sure D,
There's gotta be something costing us around $350 million per day ... Food Stamps maybe

[Frenchy]

Originally Posted by Judge

What paul is too stupid to understand is that this war is relatively, by any objective standard, cheap and is not a severe cost.

There are domestic programs that are costing and will cost greatly more and yeild much less significant results.

He's still an idiot extraordinare.

The blood of good men is not cheap by any objective standard...Unless of course it's not your's being shed.

[Judge]

The 3 trillion dollar figure is bogus as hell... It comes from Stiglitz a Clinton appointee and big critic of the war. He basically cooked the numbers to pump them up as much as he could. If you'll read, you'll see a bunch of critics of his study and methodolgy have come out including Richard Zerbe, Associate Dean at the University of Washington School of Public Affairs and president-elect for the International Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (IBSBCA), who also opposes the war, but who has pointed out that Stiglitz and Bilmes analysis is “clearly double-counting the costs. It should be obvious.”

He also has difficulties with the values attached to some of problems created by the war such as regarding veterans who are disabled and unable to work. Zerbe points out it goes too far to attach the same loss to those soldiers as to soldiers who have died. He feels that the Stiglitz and Bilmes analysis has “too narrow a view of life, way too production orientated.” Zerbe argues that just because these disabled soldiers can’t work doesn’t mean that they place no value on living.

To get an idea of how large Stiglitz and Bilmes’s numbers are, compare them the Congressional Budget Office’s Matthew Goldberg, the Deputy Assistant Director for National Security who is no friend of the war. He testifed before congress that the future medical care costs, disability compensation, and survivors’ benefits up to 2017 would likely range from $10 to $13 billion. But with these authors putting their estimate of total costs of veteran injuries at over $900 billion ($630 billion from taking care of the wounded and $273 billion from the harm done to wounded and injured soldiers), it is hard at first to believe that they are talking about the same thing.

Ed Browing, a PhD from Princeton, currently at TAMU and a widely cited author, is even more critical than Zerbe. He notes that, “$473 billion is the most defensible estimate of the cost of the war over the first five years. Everything beyond that is padded. They invent unrealistic scenarios, double count, and the like.”

One simple example involves Stiglitz and Bilmes counting both the expenditures on the war as well as the interest payments paid on the money borrowed to finance those expenditures. As far as the taxpayers are concerned, they care about what they have to pay. If the money is borrowed, you can’t count both the current expenditure and the future interest payments because taxpayers don’t have to pay directly now for the current expenditures. It is only when they pay off the interest that they will really pay the bill.


The same issue arises when they count both the salaries and benefits paid to the soldiers plus the costs of their medical care on the one hand — all part of the non-disputed operational costs — and also attaching additional value of life lost to those soldiers who have been killed or injured. Risky jobs such as being a police officer or stunt man require higher pay and benefits to compensate for the chance of being killed or injured. Indeed, it is this very premium that economists use to calculate the loss from police officers getting killed. Economists traditionally count either one of these costs that Stiglitz and Bilmes include, but not both at the same time.


Al Harberger, an economics professor at UCLA and the current president of the ISBCA, mentions another concern about the book. Interest rates enter into calculating the costs of the war not only in terms of interest payments on loans, as we have already discussed, but also how to put into current day dollars costs that may not be born for a decade from now.

Harberger argues that a too low interest rate makes it look like the future expenditures on the war look larger today than they really are. Higher interest rates mean that you don’t have to put aside as much money to pay for those future costs. In Stiglitz and Bilmes’s case, they use an interest rate below what it costs the government to borrow money. Harberger says that the opposite is true, the rate should be higher and you have to figure out what private investment you are giving up by loaning money to the government.

Surprisingly, Stiglitz and Bilmes’ book never mentions or responds to well-know responses from other academics who have criticized their earlier published claims. The most notable critics are Stephen Davis, Kevin Murphy and Robert Topel, professors at the University of Chicago. Even Davis, Murphy and Topel’s worst-case estimate of the costs of the war run up to $1 trillion in today’s dollars, with their most realistic estimates at less than half that amount.

On oil prices, Stiglitz and Bilmes argue that “the longer [the war] has dragged on, the higher the prices have gone. This certainly suggests the war has something to do with the rising prices. On this almost all oil experts agree.” But, again, even those who oppose the war disagree with this claim. Peter Hartley, a professor at Rice University who specializes in energy economics, told FOX News that in fact the opposite was more nearly the case: “Almost all oil experts would disagree.”


Hartley said that the “increase in prices from the war is only temporary. You can only change prices by changes in supply or demand. The only supply and demand changes that they could point to from the war are some temporary changes from uncertainty.”

Then there is the huge cost for the Iraqi people. Possibly the most controversial claim in the book involves their estimate that well over one million Iraqis will have died from the US invasion by the year 2010. Without any caution or hesitation, they rely on an extremely controversial study published in the medical journal, Lancet. Stiglitz and Bilmes took Lancet’s estimated 654,965 deaths from the American involvement in Iraq from March 2003 to July 2006 and assumed that Iraqis would continue dying at that the same yearly rate through March 2010. The Lancet number is over 10 times the number of Iraqi deaths claimed by the Iraqi and US governments.

Concerns have been raised about whether Iraqis surveyed were honest and provided accurate information or whether they may have given politically motivated answers to exaggerate “’crimes’ committed by the Americans.” Some survey experts have attacked the survey for not doing the most basic things to “prevent fabrication” of the data. For instance, there was no effort to trace death certificates to confirm claimed deaths. The survey was conducted and overseen by Riyadh Lafta, a child-health official in Saddam Hussein's ministry of health, whom some claim was biased. Others have questioned why the original surveyors' reports and the raw data have never been released to other researchers.

Still others expressed concern that the timing of the survey’s release immediately before the 2006 election was political motivated and that the funding for the survey by George Soros was only discovered long after the publicity for the results had subsided.



There's more, shall I go on? Much of this is taken from John Lott, PhD University of Maryland.... there's more but I think it overkill.

Originally Posted by Delija

A joke Judge? Three trillion dollars is "cheap"? "Not a severe cost"?


Care to point out an example? Just one would be adequate. Yet you make it sound as if there are a multitude of such programs.

TIA


Peace,
D.

[Judge]

French, I appreciate your efforts to detract from my posts, but you know damn well I wasn't talking about the cost of men's lives and it's a grotesque lie for you to imply that's what i said or meant. You are among the worst at personal insults on this board, continually unable to discuss the issues and resorting to personal barbs. I suggest, unless you want the board shut down, that you simply choose not to reply if you can't discuss the issues intelligently.

Originally Posted by Frenchy

The blood of good men is not cheap by any objective standard...Unless of course it's not your's being shed.

[Delija]

Originally Posted by AZXD

Sure D,
There's gotta be something costing us around $350 million per day ... Food Stamps maybe

Damn....I forgot about that - I feel completely humiliated realizing now how many and how common the wasteful govt. spending programs we have are that cost us such heavy cake. Food stamps, a big "10-4" on that one AZ....Then there's the NEA; another economy crushing waste of probably hundreds of dollars a day (and every RED cent of it given to commie atheists who ONLY create art featuring dung on images of religious figures and paintings and sculptures celebrating the joys of gay marriage and abortions).

Thankfully we have men like Rick Santorum to keep us aware of what's going on - like how gay marriage is a "slippery slope towards bestiality".

This is probably true.....I say this because I actually asked my brother's Golden Lab about this (one night over brandy and cigars while waiting for my Cialis to kick in) after hearing about Santorum's remarks and she told me that she was upset that she wasn't adopted by a gay couple when she was at the animal shelter because she wanted to participate in some threesomes - preferably with a human lesbian couple. She admitted she wasn't very hopeful in the first place because she was in a shelter in a blue state so she knew percentage wise her chances were somewhat diminished....... Plus, she also told me she realized that humans would always have the upper hand in regards to prenuptial agreements, etc. - Guess a dog's life isn't always all it's cracked up to be).

I think I'm about to cry.

Originally Posted by Frenchy

The blood of good men is not cheap by any objective standard...Unless of course it's not your's being shed.

Frenchy....does Rizzo know you are plagiarizing? (Remember his prosecution of Etta when he busted her for this same felonious behavior?)

Your audacity is amazing.....taking the words right off the stone carving at the entrance to Dick Cheney's vacation bunker!!!

My God Frenchy....have you no shame?

LOL

Originally Posted by Judge

there's more but I think it overkill.

I think it's a little late to be concerned with that already.

Good response though Judge....as I've told you before, I don't always agree with your reasoning or the sources you cite, but your non-stop humor so deeply infused in every one of your posts increases the quality of my life in a significant way!

Thanks again, and please, please.....keep 'em coming!!!

Originally Posted by Judge

The 3 trillion dollar figure is bogus as hell... It comes from Stiglitz a Clinton appointee and big critic of the war. .

Who'd of thunk it? Can I use that in my "sig"?


Peace,
D.

[ZenMachine]

Judge, would you mind naming one of those federal programs that is costing taxpayers more than the war? You neglected to do that in your last posts. Also, what is Iraq going to yield in the future that will benefit us so?

[FrankRizzoXD40]

Originally Posted by Delija

Frenchy....does Rizzo know you are plagiarizing? (Remember his prosecution of Etta when he busted her for this same felonious behavior?)

Etta pasted several paragraphs and made them appear that they were her writing, in response to a post by Ed Ely. She took credit for the opinions of others. Frenchy is clearly stating something that is well-known. There was no attempt to deceive.

Most everyone, including Frenchy, agreed that etta's blatant plagiarism was wrong. If you want to be the only one who defends her, go right ahead.

Here's a link to remind people of what I am talking about...
I am wondering if it is accurate!..about Obama

Etta was even quoting Ed's posts and then responding to them with someone else's words. Sorry that you can't make the distinction between what Frenchy wrote and what she did.

And I'm sure Etta appreciates you bringing up the fact that she blatantly plagiarized on this forum. Why can't you let sleeping dogs lie?

Frank