Democrat blames Iraq for weak economy (radio address)

[cal04]

Source: Associated Press

The growing cost to the United States of fighting the war in Iraq "is not only linked to our economic skid, but is a leading cause of it," a Democratic congressman said Saturday.

Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky linked the costly, unpopular war with the growing economic troubles — some say recession — in this country.

Yarmuth said in the Democrats' weekly radio address that the testimony this week of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker about the Iraq war served as reminder of the billions of dollars being poured into Iraq as the U.S. economy struggles.

"General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker failed to offer a plan to change direction in Iraq and redeploy our troops," Yarmuth said. "Instead, they offered more of the same, with U.S. troops and taxpayers paying the price."

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080412/ap_on_go_co/democrats_economy_1

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Congressman John Yarmuth Delivers Democratic Radio Address
http://www.dnc.org/a/2008/04/congressman_joh_6.php

[babylonsister]

1. Good, and rec'd. Keep linking the two; we win in November. nt

[Eric Condon]

2. Yarmuth is a great, underrated representative.

He represents Louisville and although he technically isn't my rep (I live across the river on the Indiana side), I still consider him a great advocate for my area. He is absolutely correct to link the two.

[alfredo]

8. He's a good man. Glad he is also linking our economy to the war.

Here's two quotes by Osama bin Laden to drive the point home that bush is playing into his hands.

"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah,"

"We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat,"

[Sam Ervin jret]

3. even voters who sometimes choose republican should be able to understand this connection.

spending lots of money on war we don't have + need to go further into debt to pay for war = war causing us economic trouble

and that's just the beginning of the story,

but it's also just that simple.

[DemocratInSoCal]

4. Nope, Too Complicated

25% Will ALWAYS be either too Corrupt or STUPID to understand.

[DeepModem Mom]

5. K&R

[LiberalFighter]

6. When do we stop throwing money into barrel that keeps disappearing for the war

and start using the money and National Guards stationed over there for our economy?

We are wasting resources in Iraq that is not productive.

[happygoluckytoyou]

7. HARD TO BELIEVE THAT $3 TRILLION COULD DO THAT

JOHN "THE REPUBLICAN" MCCAIN AND HILLARY "REPUBLICAN LITE" CLINTON ARE OUT OF TOUCH...
WHY ELSE WOULD THEY DEFEND THE WAR...EVER!!! DID SOMEONE SAY THE CLINTONS EARNED $110 MILLION
LAST YEAR.... GUESS THAT $4 GAS IS HITTING THEM PRETTY HARD

JOHN "THE REPUBLICAN" MCCAIN AND HILLARY "REPUBLICAN LITE" CLINTON ARE OUT OF TOUCH...
WHY ELSE WOULD THEY DEFEND THE WAR...EVER!!! DID SOMEONE SAY THE CLINTONS EARNED $110 MILLION
LAST YEAR.... GUESS THAT $4 GAS IS HITTING THEM PRETTY HARD

LETS GO BACK TO THAT BITTER THING..... YES IM BITTER... AND GETTING BITTERER BY THE MINUTE

[ovidsen]

9. Hate to say it, but Yarmuth is wrong

In the short term, the Iraq war (like virtually all wars) has actually helped the economy. The war injects money into the general economy because somebody has to design, build and transport the death machines that make wars possible. And they have to be paid.

In the long run, of course, it's an economic drag, since the money we're spending to finance Iraq is borrowed, and we're eventually
gonna have to pay it back. But not in the short term.

Nope, more important factors in the current US economic stagnation have been issues like the subprime loan mess, the Bear Stearns collapse, the sharp rises in prices on commodity markets for basics like wheat and corn, and (of course) the ever spiralling price of oil.

Please don't take this as an endorsement of the Iraq war. Before that idiot Bush sent the first troops in, I was telling anyone who would listen that it was a BIG mistake; Iraq had no WMDs, was not supporting international terrorism, was not behind 9/11, and was a marginal threat to world peace. The no fly zones initiated after the 1991 Guf War by the first President Bush, and maintained through Clinton's entire 8 years in office (among other things) had reduced Saddam to a tinpot buffoon, whose biggest fear was losing his grip on those small parts of Iraq that he still managed to control. Invading Iraq was a colossal blunder and Bush should be tried for war crimes.

But to say that the Iraq war is responsible for our current economic woes is, quite simply, inaccurate.

[struggle4progress]

11. The President @ American Society of Newspaper Editors, Statler Hotel, 16 April 1953

...Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron ...

You seem to imagine that there is one simple thing called "the economy," that revives by any monetary injection whatsoever. But that "economy" is at best a gross abstraction, compounded of millions of individual personal acts of production and consumption and at worst it is nothing but a fiction

The state of "the economy" is appropriately judged, not by gross indicators, but by the ability of ordinary human beings to improve their lives and communities by their labor: if goods and services become harder to obtain, the corresponding rise in prices may leave the gross indicators unaffected -- but surely the person who now works twice as long to buy the same meat and potatoes notices the difference

The country can invest in war or infrastructure or in other ways: the dividends will be quite different. An investment in infrastructure produces a lasting convenience; an investment in war produces blast trash, filled coffins, and a generous supply of mentally or physically wounded veterans. Simple logic should convince you that a war economy necessarily produces scarcities and price rises. Long-term medical services must (of course) be supplied to the casualties, and this increases the general cost of health care. National Guardsmen in the war theatre could have been otherwise employed, as survivors of Katrina in New Orleans will no doubt long remember

The Iraq war actually helped the economy? I would laugh but can't because I want to cry too badly: the war helped a few war profiteers, like Halliburton (who promptly packed up and left the country); it screwed the rest of us, at the gas pump and in a thousand other ways

[ovidsen]

12. I'll repeat. Yarmuth is wrong. But Eisenhower is right.

The Democratic Congressman made the mistake of taking a snapshot of the economy right now and concluded that the Iraq war is responsible for our current malaise. (Don't you hate that word? Even if he didn't say it, that's what he suggested)

The growing cost to the United States of fighting the war in Iraq "is not only linked to our economic skid, but is a leading cause of it," a Democratic congressman said Saturday.

Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky linked the costly, unpopular war with the growing economic troubles — some say recession — in this country.

Our economic stall right now has little to do with the Iraq war. But as I tried to point out in my earlier post, and as the late Dwight Eisenhower noted so eloquently in his 1953 speech, We. Will. Pay.

If Democraic Party leaders want the credibility they deserve, they'll have to acknowledge that the immediate effect of "the war on terruh" on our large, mysterious, crazily fungible economy is NOT the major cause of any recession. Today.

It's when the bills from this war when they come due that will see the spit hitting the sham. Heck, throw in aging Baby Boomers, escalating Social Security and Medicare expenses (in addition to gyrating food and energy prices.... oh, and the dishonesty of criminal bankers) and you've got a REAL fubar.

The "war on terruh" is just the tip of the iceberg.

[struggle4progress]

13. War with Iraq could spark recession (BBC / 8 September 2002)

... The chain reaction starts with a spike in the cost of oil, which in turn raises business costs, leads to possible unemployment, or simply makes it more expensive to heat our homes and run our cars ...

"... for a recession there would have to be a sustained spike in the oil price." <says Nigel Pain of London's National Institute of Economic and Social Research> ...

At the moment, the cost of Brent crude oil is hovering just below $30 a barrel. During the Gulf War of 1991, it shot up above $40 ...

"If it persists at high levels, perhaps for six to nine months, then that could lead to a recession," says Mr Pain ...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2240551.stm

The War on Terrorism, the World Oil Market and the U.S. Economy
Terrorism, Energy Security
George L. Perry, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies
The Brookings Institution
October 24, 2001 —
Revised November 28, 2001

... The worse case, however, has important bad impacts. Oil prices rise to $75 per barrel, double their previous highest level, and gasoline prices rise to $2.78 per gallon. This shock would add perhaps 5 percentage points to the overall inflation rate the first year and would be likely to cause or deepen recessions in the United States and throughout the world ...

http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2001/1024terrorism_perry.aspx

Gas Prices Set Record, Oil Moves Higher

... "We do think prices, particularly for self-serve regular, are going to continue to go up," AAA fuel price analyst Geoff Sundstrom said.

Oil prices .. edged higher .. but remained .. below an all-time high set earlier in the week ...

"Its obviously a very distressing situation for the commercial transportation sector," Sundstrom said ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/12/AR2008041200817.html

Inflation Nation: A Guide to Your Pocketbook Blues

... There is still the issue of why oil prices have quadrupled since 2002. There are three standard explanations — supply and demand, speculation and the U.S. government’s monetary policy.

The White House and many pundits point to supply and demand because it’s presented as a natural economic law beyond
anyone’s control ... But from 2002 to 2006, even as oil prices tripled, global oil production kept up with demand by increasing 7.6 million barrels a day to 84.6 MBD.

There are some supply constraints, but these mainly stem from U.S. foreign policy. The Bush administration has destabilized three major oil producers that have suffered declining production in recent years — Iran, Iraq and Venezuela ...

http://www.indypendent.org/2008/04/12/inflation-nation-a-guide-to-your-pocketbook-blues/

Plenty of people warned of this in advance

[ovidsen]

14. One more try, and we'll agree to disagree

You may not like Paul Krugman, the self described liberal economist who writes regularly for the New York Times As it happens, I do. I'll wager he's smarter than both of us. Please be so kind as to click below:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/opinion/24krugman.html

"The war is indeed a grotesque waste of resources, which will place huge long-run burdens on the American public. But it’s just wrong to blame the war for our current economic mess: in the short run, wartime spending actually stimulates the economy. Remember, the lowest unemployment rate America has experienced over the last half-century came at the height of the Vietnam War."

Krugman argues that it's been naked selfishness (Gordon Gekko would be proud), soaring commodies prices for food basics, the subprime crisis caused by blatant greed (spread all around, from banker to speculator to consumer) in the unregulated home mortgage securities package market, the falling dollar and, of course, higher fuel prices, that is behind the PRESENT economic stagnation. Not the "war on terruh".

He does not minimize the effects that the cost of the Iraq War will have on us in the future. Neither do I. In fact, he's made dire predictions about them. But for now, he argues that the present recession and the Iraq War have little to do with our current situation. You are welcome to dismiss his opinion. It's a free country, and (let's face it) respectful disagreements among true blue Democrats are what this board is all about.

Peace, friend.

edit for formatting

Oh yeah. Might as well K and R....

[struggle4progress]

15. "Prior to George Bush's Global War on Terror, the U.S. military admitted to guzzling 4.62 billion

gallons of oil per year. With the Pentagon's post-9/11 wars and occupations, annual oil consumption has grown to an almost unfathomable 5.46 billion gallons, according to the Pentagon's possibly low-ball statistics."

http://www.petroleumworld.com/sf08041301.htm

[grahamhgreen]

10. FINALLY THEY ARE GETTING TO THE CORE ISSUE - WAR PROFITEERING, THE SCOURGE OF OUR TIME.

As slave traders were to the 1800's war profiteers are to our time.