If Republicans Really Love America, Hey, How About a Refund, Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

If Republicans Really Love America, Hey, How About a Refund, Iraq War Cost U.S. $2.2 Trillion, Claimed Nearly 200,000 Lives

A new report by the “Costs of War” project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies finds that nearly 200,000 people, including soldiers and civilians, were killed in the war in Iraq President George W. Bush launched 10 years ago.

The report also found that American taxpayers will ultimately spend roughly $2.2 trillion on the war, but because the U.S. government borrowed to finance the conflict, interest payments through the year 2053 means that the total bill could reach nearly $4 trillion.

“Nearly every government that goes to war underestimates its duration, neglects to tally all the costs, and overestimates the political objectives that will be accomplished by war’s violence,” said Boston University professor of political science and project co-director Neta C. Crawford.

Indeed, the war devastated the Iraqi health care system and allowed militants to hone their skills and export them to neighboring conflicts:

    Terrorism in Iraq increased dramatically as a result of the invasion and tactics and fighters were exported to Syria and other neighboring countries.

    Iraq’s health care infrastructure remains devastated from sanctions and war. More than half of Iraq’s medical doctors left the country during the 2000s, and tens of thousands of Iraqi patients are forced to seek health care outside the country.

The Watson Institute project — which involves “30 economists, anthropologists, lawyers, humanitarian personnel, and political scientists from 15 universities, the United Nations, and other organizations” — comes on the heals of the Special Inspector-General for Iraq Reconstruction’s final report released last week finding that the U.S. spent $60 billion on reconstruction efforts in Iraq and that $10 billion of it was wasted on fraud and abuse.

Reuters reported that Steven Bucci, the military assistant to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in the run-up to the war and today a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, didn’t dispute the report’s findings but said the U.S.’s post-invasion battles with al-Qaeda in Iraq — a group that did not exist prior to March 19, 2003 — made the war worth it.

“It was really in Iraq that ‘al Qaeda central’ died,” Bucci said. “They got waxed.”

Meanwhile, the AP reported this afternoon that “a string of explosions tore through central Baghdad within minutes of each other on Thursday, followed by what appeared to be a coordinated assault by gunmen who battled security forces in the Iraqi capital.” The AP said the attack — which reportedly killed 12 people — “bore the hallmarks of Al Qaeda’s Iraq arm.”

We probably will not be getting a refund because conservatives are spending it on lobbyist to get more tax cuts for millionaires, make sure that women do not make medical decisions about their own bodies and further deregulating banks so they can continue to steal from working class Americans.

Is The U.S.A. Becoming a Marxist Country. In a Way, and Conservative Republicans Are Helping

Is The U.S.A. Becoming a Marxist Country. In a Way, and Conservative Republicans Are Helping Weird

Statistics are boring, but it’s important to wrap your head around this latest one from the Federal Reserve as the definitive epitaph for the American dream. Wall Street’s financial shenanigans, the banking games that made some fat cats outrageously wealthy as they turned home mortgages into toxic securities, wiped out 20 years of growth in American families’ net worth.
“Americans saw wealth plummet 40% from 2007 to 2010, Federal Reserve says,” is how The Washington Post headlined the startling news that all of the economic gain of the past two decades had been destroyed by the banking meltdown. And with housing values—the bulk of middle-class savings—indefinitely moribund, the situation will not get better anytime soon.

“The recession caused the greatest upheaval among the middle class,” the Post noted. “... Their median net worth ... suffered the biggest drops. By contrast, the wealthiest families’ median net worth rose slightly.”

That outcome, disastrous to the American ideal of a nation of mostly middle-class stakeholders competing on a relatively equal economic playing field, was preordained. When tens of millions lost their jobs and homes as a result of financial swindles that the Federal Reserve failed to prevent, this ostensibly public agency, with strong bipartisan support in the White House and Congress, adroitly directed the flow of public funds to save the bankers while abandoning their victims.

On Tuesday Sen. Bernie Sanders, acting under authority of the Dodd-Frank financial regulations, released the conclusions of a Government Accountability Office report showing that “[d]uring the financial crisis, at least 18 former and current directors from Federal Reserve Banks worked in banks and corporations that collectively received over $4 trillion in low-interest loans from the Federal Reserve."

One of those Fed directors, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has been on the New York Fed board since 2007, testified before Congress on Wednesday that he was sorry his company lost billions in risky trading even after all of the warnings concerning too-big-to-fail banks.

Dimon—whose company last year paid him $24 million, compared to the $45,800 median U.S. family income—testified that the bank could manage its own affairs. But that is hardly reassuring given that the Fed provided JPMorgan Chase $391 billion in total assistance as well as paying the bank to administer the government’s emergency lending program. It was the Fed that back in March of 2008 made $29 billion available to Dimon’s bank so it could acquire beleaguered Bear Stearns; the Fed also agreed to purchase Bear Stearns’ most toxic assets before the merger.

Conservative Republican Hank Paulson was Treasury Secretary when this banks started to fail. Moderate conservative Republican Ben Bernanke was and still is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.A majority of conservatives in both houses of Congress voted for the bank rescue known as TARP. It might well have been necessary to rescue the banks - Hoover did so in the 1920s - which FDR continued. Ronald Reagan seized the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, had the government reorganize them. Though what they could have done in 2007-2008 was seize the banks, isolate toxic assets and broken them up into smaller competitive banks that were no longer too big to fail. Instead conservative Republicans in the government used socialism for the wealthy. They made the public pay for the bank losses. They also made the public pay for the losses they suffered because of the banks, themselves ( Obama has set up a mortgage assistance program for average Americans, but it is not big enough). Now that the Great Recession has settled in for at least another three to five years, conservative Republicans are saying that the failures of conservative policy must continue to be paid for by the middle-class and low income workers by cuts in college loans, cuts in or gutting Medicare altogether. We have Marxism in America for the wealthy - who never have to pay for their loses or their risks. Those losses will be paid for the the proletariat - the workers. No wonder Republicans are always calling liberals socialists. It is to distract from their own very real crony corporate socialism for conservatives and their base, the wealthy and powerful elite.


Ex-loan officer claims Wells Fargo targeted black communities for shoddy loans


Contrary To Anti-American Conservative Broadcaster Limbaugh's Claims, Public-Sector Workers Do 
 Contribute To Economic Growth

How to buy an election. Because conservative Republicans cannot win an election based on their ideas, Billionaire Adelson Pledges Unlimited Campaign Contributions To Mitt Romney

Repealing Health Care Reform (ACA) Would Increase Government Debt

Repealing Health Care Reform (ACA) Would Increase Government Debt

A new report by an independent government auditor concludes that implementing President Obama’s health care law as intended will make a significant dent in the long-term debt forecast.

The report comes as Supreme Court justices weigh striking some of “Obamacare’s” central provisions — and perhaps the law in its entirety — and as the Republican Party remains committed to repealing the law if it seizes control of government in November.

“[I]f the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is implemented as intended it would have a major effect on the [fiscal] gap but would not eliminate it,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in a Monday report — a conclusion in line with its own past research and similar research conducted by other government and non-government analysts.

GAO doesn’t isolate PPACA’s stand-alone contribution to long-term budget consolidation. But it does conclude that if key cost-control measures in the law, and other automatic cuts to Medicare spending baked into current law, are ignored, or overridden by Congress, the implications for the national debt are vast.

If “Obamacare” is implemented as intended, and other measures, such as automatic payment cuts to Medicare physicians, take effect, “spending on Medicare and Medicaid grows from 5 percent of GDP in 2010 to over 7 percent by 2030.”

By contrast, if Congress overrides those provisions, “[s]pending on health care grows much more rapidly under this more pessimistic set of assumptions,” according to the report.

 It is not as though conservatives really care about the deficit. It exploded partly because of the Bush tax cuts and failure to rise revenue for two wars. The first time in modern US history a president and his party did not attempt to pay for its foreign policy decisions. 

Conservative Romney’s plan would increase debt to 96 percent of GDP by 2021

Romney’s plan would increase debt to 96 percent of GDP by 2021

Several independent analyses have shows that the economic plans put forth by the GOP presidential candidates Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum would cause the deficit to explode. Just last month, Romney — who won the Arizona and Michigan primaries this week — unveiled a plan that would increase deficits by $10.7 trillion.

But Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), who chairs the House Budget Committee, told Bloomberg TV today that he finds the GOP candidates’ plans “very credible,” before he went on complain about the Obama administration’s budget for increasing deficits too much:

    Very credible. They are talking about entitlement reform. They are putting specifics on the table on Medicare and Social Security reform. The president, knowing that these are the big drivers of our debt, is ducking it. He gave us a budget that increases spending about $1.5 trillion and has a tax increase of $1.9 trillion. So out of the $47 trillion he is planning over the next ten years, he only wants to deliver about $400 billion of deficit reduction– is a scintilla of deficit reduction. It is ignoring the program, punting, ducking the issue. It’s the fourth budget from the president. It is not serious. We need serious leadership, and both of these candidates have put very credible, specific, serious plans on the table.

Ryan then dismissed the Tax Policy Center analysis showing that Romney’s planned 20 percent reduction in tax rates and repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax would increase the debt by $3 trillion, claiming that Romney has “base broadening” that will offset the cost. Romney has made the same claim, but has yet to provide any specifics about what sort of tax provisions he’ll eliminate. Simply put, his plan’s math doesn’t add up.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, Romney’s plan would increase debt to 96 percent of GDP by 2021, unless he actually follows through with his offsets, at which point it would go to 86 percent. Santorum’s plan, meanwhile, would bring it to 104 percent of GDP. The Committee’s “realistic baseline” for the debt projects it going to 85 percent of GDP by 2021. So all of the GOP candidate’s plans (except for Ron Paul’s) make the debt projection substantially worse.

Ryan, of course, has plenty of experience with budget-busting economic plans, so perhaps its not surprising that he finds the latest offerings from the GOP candidates so enticing.

At no time when conservative Republicans have held the nations' purse strings have they presented a reasonable or balanced budget. During the Bush years as some may remember Republican John Mccain even said conservatives were spending like "drunken sailors". Conservatives seem to have no concept of math or what is best for America. Conservatism has become the sheath anti-America movement, hiding its radical agenda behind a lot flag waving fake patriotism.