historiblogography

too scared to brake

Might it be possible, by pointing to the economic legacy of wars funded with the printing press, to at least partially explain the increasingly bizarre refusal of the Bush crew to acknowledge reality in Iraq ?

For the last five years, and especially the last three, deficit spending on defence -- especially with the metastisizing GWOT "supplementals" -- has poured money into the economy. A $300 billion-a-year pre-9/11 defense budget has turned into a $500 billion+ defense budget, all on the national credit card and accompanied by tax cuts, and the end of the war shuts off the air. You can guess what that will do to the balloon.

And so the Republican leadership in Washington has to know that ending the war in 2007 steers the economy into the wall in 2008 -- just in time for the next presidential election. And, yes, I just mixed my metaphors.

So it seems to me that there is a significant element of domestic political calculation in the evident desire to keep the pump going. Which would mean that these are some mighty funny conservatives: Their interventionist foreign policy is built on a tawdry and expedient foundation of quasi-Keynesian economics. Square the passion for tax cuts with $400 billion in new Medicare entitlements and the first pillar of this Statement of Principles, if you doubt that conclusion.

posted by Chris Bray @ 4:51 PM