I hope you take the time to read this extremely long bulletin/blog
it may just clear up some things (especially to those ingnorant liberal college kids who just want to end the war for peace's sake) about the political practice of war and show just how the presidency should be renamed "scapegoat"

P.S. I'm Scott, and I initiated this discussion because someone was arguing the right to vote as a personal choice and was tired of being demanded to vote by others...and i agreed :)

Matt wrote

in reply to whoever scott is: you are right about checks and balances, but if you recall, congress didn't become primarily democratic until bush had already taken us into a war. it's hard to stop a country from going downhill when you're spending 10 billion dollars a month that you don't have...know what i'm sayin??
 
 Scott Turek wrote

yes but in return the spending on the war hadn't reached peak until 2004 after the first real invasion of Iraq in 2003, and even then congress has been passing bills to spend more money toward the military. My salary when I was a marine raised substantially (about 2-3 percent) from 2004 to 2008, and more bills are being passed almost monthly on military spending. 
 
 Matt wrote

and thank god that'll stop in 3 months time.
 
 Scott Turek wrote

if we pull out in three months time then NOTHING good will have come from being over there in the first place... and besides, dont you know that the war IS NOT ending? it's mearly shifting. Iraw may be over, but Obama CLEARLY stated that we will continue in Afghanistan. it's also wrong of you to think that our armed forces and veterans don't deserve compensation for the hardships that we volunteered to endure...to which most of the war funds are appropriated.
 
 Matt wrote:

Let me ask you this. After 8 years, what good has come out of it?? How long do we have to stay?? Iraq was never supposed to be involved in the first place. Bush went in because Hussein "had WMDs" and wouldn't give them up. In case you're an idiot, that's code for "shit, my dad couldn't get that fucker, so i will." I am perfectly aware that the war is not ending. We are fighting a war on terror which will never end - ever. My concern is that we stop wasting time and money in Iraq when the war we started was in Afghanistan. And i never said anything about soldiers not deserving compensation. I'm just saying that if we werent fighting a war that need not be fought, then we wouldnt' have to have so many soldiers, thus lowering the towering debt that we have already accumulated.
As for Alisons comment about joining the army for a reason. That's the most ridiculous thing you've said yet. You join the army so you can go to war?? I mean, yeah, we might as well stay over there. Why not stay in a never ending war until our economy and our civilization collapse. No problem.
 
Scott Turek wrote:

8 years of war, and what do we have to show? You're right about Bush trying to one up on daddy dearest, but in case you haven't noticed there are two main factors to what we have gained from the war in Iraq and the "needless spending" the US has put forth.
Saddam Hussein was a world leader that mirrored other famous leaders such as Hitler and Stalin. Whether you like it or not he DID commit international war crimes via genocide by using chemical and bilogical agents to massacre over 180,000 kurdish men women and children and mame almost a million more. Saying this I don't really think it was right to invade Iraq on the purpose of the mystical "WMD's," but I'm sure as fuck happy that we invaded and secured a future for that country in some way shape or form.

Now, to the more localized and immediate threat to our own security.

as you might recall, our nation's economy is based primarily on the credit schemes of a few select companies and banks that lend and borrow themselves. Our country has seen cases in which creditors give money in the form of credit, mortgages, loans, and such to millions of american people that could NOT pay ithe money back, thus resulting in a total loss of corporate investments on individuals toward each congruent US banking system...there was simply not enough money in the banks for the people who tried to claim their own money back, thus losing it all... the lack of money printed plus the money owed to the creditors of the time had a HUGE impact on the market and was one of the two leading factors in what caused the GREAT DEPRESSION. sounds interestingly similiar to today's 1 trillion dollar mortgage bailout, isn't it?
 
now our economy has seen it's share of ups and downs and all arounds, and what seems to stay constant is the ever shifting tide of recession and depression. although mild, the government was still able to pull our country out of a mild crisis by supplimenting those financial institutions temporarily, thus building a monsterous debt to the government within our own nation and toward other nations. this is what we call a DEFICIT.
Now, tell me a good way to pull an entire nation out of a depression?
make jobs, insure the banks, print more money, etc.

when WWII came about, it provided a good base on which FDR's New Deal could be supplimented by federal jobs (i.e, the military, building war machines, etc.); this became known as a WARTIME ECONOMY.
More money was being earned by more people with jobs  provided by the government, thus providing more people the money to spend on any particular thing....thus stimulating the economy.

but today we are in a much graver situation.

if it not for bush (and congress I might add) approving this war and spending 10 billion dollars a month (most of which goes to salaries and contracts to servicemembers and affiliates), our economy would not exist any more.

let me emphasize this:

within the time span from WWII to now our national economy has grown to a world market. Many interational lenders and creditors doing exactly the same damned thing as in the early 1910's and 20's..only on a global scale. The debt accrued by the entire world on itself is TREMENDOUSLY larger than was ever thought possible. companies kept lending, people and governments can't pay, and treasuries wont' print more money in fear of defacing the value of dollars.
if it weren't for bush's little 10 billion dollar a month war time economy (that pays for contracts, military, civilian and neomilitary contracts and salary) and stimulated pay and spendature, our economy, which is the center of the free world market at the moment, would have frozen by the year 2004 and collapsed the ENTIRE WORLD MARKET...

let me reiterate this point with a more in depth history lesson:

On Oct. 28, 1929, The Wall Street Journal's main headline announced that the ''Industrials'' were ''off 38.33.*'' The next day, they fell another 30.57 points. (Those two plunges, of 12.82% and 11.73% respectively, remain the second-highest and third-highest of all time in percentage terms, behind the record 22.61% crash on Black Monday, Oct. 19, 1987.) In six days, the industrial average lost more than 96 points, nearly 30% of its value.

*These indexes were based off creditor's investments toward other private firms, based on the credit economy provided to the american people. people couldn't pay the financial firms, and the firms couldn't pay for their investments.

If our market were to fail marginally as was predicted if spending were to keep at a constant pre-9/11 state, we would, by this day, probably be living in a world not too dissimilar from Kevin Cosner's "The Postman," nations would war with one another for food and water rights (for the prices would skyrocket, people would lose jobs, and without people or moeny no food would grow, and when you get hungry, you attack your neighbor), and using world wide currencies as toilet paper.

So, I'd say it's pretty fair that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have both A. help save a group of human beings from genocide and B. help impede the process of an entire global meltdown

I could go into pages of detail about how US economists raised the price of oil, the government spending a trillion dollars to save the banks some grace, and how the collapse is eventually inevitable. just think of the market as a sound wave. first it starts with a pitch with waves closer together. as is moves outward, the waves slow and become elongated and then finally disipate.
our marekt was strong, then fell, strong, then fell, and strong (like waves) and it's becomming so stretched thin that soon enough it will just dissipate and collapse entirely.

Matt wrote:

so you're telling me that by SPENDING 10 billion a month on the salaries of military personnel, we are saving the economy?? i don't buy it. 
 
 Scott Turek wrote:

the money that the US spends doesn't go entirely toward arms (cruise missles, oil, expended resources).... only about 5-6 percent does. the rest goes toward salary, contractors, security forces, mercenaries, munitions and war machine factories...etc. this money that the government spends goes directly in to the pockets of spending consumers AND TAXED as a means for the government to gain capital, thus providing a basis of cash flow for the world economy.
the US even tried to do this WITHOUT implementing service required monetary compensation by giving us a 600 dollar tax break this summer because the government wasn't giving out ENOUGH money to consumers...remember?

some families even got a bigger check in the mail... but let's do the minimums... say there's about 250,000,000 ciitizens in the U.S...
about 1/3 of those are minors, so we wont worry about them. that leaves us about 166.7 million people that were eligable the six hundred dollars.
even a lot of those people didn't qualify so we'll leave it at about 83.3 million people.

83.3 million x 600 equals about 49,880,000,000 dollars...... in one month.........

and that's only the bare numbers and figures.
 
 Matt wrote:

i understand that by putting money in the pockets of consumers it will help the economy. How about this situation though. We are not in a war where we are spending that much money on military. That 10 billion dollars is not spent (including the 5-6 percent (which is still 50,000,000). That money still flows back into our economy. You can't tell me that being in a war is the only way to save our economy. That's a ridiculous claim.

 
 Scott Turek wrote

you're wrong...the government couldn't print out and just give all that money out without being able to tax it, or else the government wouldn't gain anything at all from the deal. by giving it to corporations that provide war services (technology, resources, materials) and allowing those corporations to give decent salaries their employees, federal tax is then implemented three different ways... once for the corporation, once for the individual, and once for indivudual spendature. this means that instead of the government earning back on only one of those three options, it's earning money on all three levels of taxation. tax money is the only way that the government can get money without printing more, unless the government wants to intentionally devalue the dollar. and they certainly couldn't raise the national salary index for independant earnings without the value of the dollar plummeting anyways.

I never said that war was the only way to save our economy...i said that it was the quickest TEMPORARY way to stimulate the economy with such a large quantity of money. It's a HORRIBLE way to simulate the economy make the US citizen happy because these economic fluxuations are innevibitable no matter what, it's just a matter of time when quick fixes just won't work.
 
it's a lose lose situation for everyone in the end...

the biggest industry in the world is war, and this is why it is used as an economic stimulus.
it's fast,
it's costly (more than the cigarette, music, and alcohol industries combined... food and the drug war ((but that's a different economic medium)) are the only things that outweighs conventional war)
and it's extremely inhumane.
but it works.

politics is an ugly affair.
but think about it this way...today's political wars:
1. substantially balance the monetary value of any which national currency
2. stimuluate an economy
3. provide jobs and a steady paycheck (every nation's military is the largest corporation with the most employees in that nation unless the military doesn't exist or is destroyed)
4. provide some means of population control (less mouths to feed, more money in the national treasury)
5. allow the government (in pertinence to the united states) to rid itself of any group of people that tries to impede the american process
and 6. a war for specific reasons provided that that are just are legal.
(if the US government had argued the point that i made in this extremely long note, then iit would be illegal according to the Geneva Conventions... the argument against saddam hussein's crimes against humanity and the stupid claims of WMD's and such were a legitimate reason to invade iraq according to the UN).

America wants to take over the world someday, but it doesn't want to take on the whole world (the UN) at one time*
 
*no responses since