“the administration is also counting $848 billion in phantom savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the administration had long made clear those wars would end.”
That makes sense…but doesn’t really. It’s not phantom savings.
It’s real:
WaPo: In the Congressional Budget Office’s projections of future spending, that money is in the deficit projection.
So when you hear people in Washington say that we’re facing large deficits over the next decade, they’re including those war costs.
So you can say that cutting that spending — which makes expected savings into law — is a spending cut, or you can say the deficit projection was inflated by the war costs, and as such, we need less deficit reduction than we thought.
Bush II and the Republicans placed the cost for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars off the books so that the American people would not realize how much debt was piling up and be less resistant to tax cuts for the rich,
ReplyDeleteObama did the fiscally responsible thing by placing those war debts back into the budget where they belonged, because they do in fact have to be paid at some point. The resulting expansion of the "official" debt, reflecting the Bush team's obscene dishonety and incompetence, was then blamed on Obama by the Koch-Baggers. Those dramatic Obama debt charts the Republicans are so fond of waving around merely illustrate the amount of debt that was pushed off into the future by the imbecile from Texas.
That the corporate media hasn't been up to the task of explaining this simple reality to the American people reflects just how far down the road to Oligarchy we have already stumbled.
The drive to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education and other public services is the direct result of the cost of our wars of aggression and conquest. The Devil must be paid. When it comes to war there is no free ride, I don't care what those lying bastards have told you.
So what do you want, health, education and a functioning society or a vast worldwide empire? Make a choice, because you can't have both.