Sunday, February 1, 2009

On the conservatives' spending priorities

Barney Frank makes an interesting point:
The largest spending bill in history is going to turn out to be the one in Iraq. If we're going to talk about spending, I have a problem when we leave out that extraordinary expensive, damaging war in Iraq, which has caused much more harm than good in my judgment. I don't understand from my conservative friends, building a road, building a school, helping to get health care, that's wasteful spending. But that war in Iraq, that's going to cost us over a trillion dollars, yeah, I wish we hadn't done that we would have been in a lot better shape fiscally.
I know that people are concerned when it comes to things like national security, and that can sometimes cause us to act in a rash manner. However, the war in Iraq -- which has been proven to be a mistake -- was a war of choice, orchestrated by conservatives who derided liberals as soft on security simply because they wanted to take a moment to think about things before dropping bombs.

When it comes to ensuring our own people are secure -- financially secure or secure in their health -- it seems that many conservatives could care less. We're told we are "socialist" in our thinking for believing everyone has a right to health care, or that, when our economy crashes, we might want to stimulate it.

Believe what you will about economic principles, but it seems like the only alternative the conservatives are offering are the very policies that got us into this mess in the first place.

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