CHESSNOID

During the 2008 presidential race, Obama campaigned that he would end the wars and bring the troops home.  So how many troops have actually come home? If you didn’t know, we have at least 7 bases if not more in Iraq and I doubt we will just abandon them.  In fact, we are literally in 3 wars right now.  Each war costs billions of taxpayer dollars.

There is a direct relationship to our budgets and these wars.  Without the wars, the federal deficit would be much smaller.  Literally ending the wars would impact our economy in a positive way.  Only the war profiteers are making money in this economy and trust me that none of it is trickling back into the main street economy.

WASHINGTON, May 26 (Reuters) – House lawmakers sent a clear warning to President Barack Obama about growing exhaustion over the war in Afghanistan on Thursday as they passed a defense policy bill authorizing $690 billion in military spending for the 2012 fiscal year.

Members of the House of Representatives made two attempts to force a change in Obama’s Afghan war strategy, falling just a few votes shy on one measure that would have required him to begin planning for a stepped-up withdrawal. A vote to bar U.S. troops on the ground in Libya passed nearly unanimously.

The votes came as the Republican-led House debated and passed the National Defense Authorization Act, 322-96, approving a $553 billion Pentagon base budget and $119 billion for overseas contingency operations, mainly the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The remaining $18 billion is for military-related nuclear activity at the Department of Energy.

Look at the numbers I highlighted in the Reuters article. Remember that the official US deficit is about 15 trillion dollars. This Afghanistan bill will cost US taxpayers 690 billion dollars which is not that far away from 1 trillion dollars.  Since we have a budget deficit now, where will the money come from? No where, they keep adding these costs on to the deficit which is ballooning exponentially.

It is no coincidence that the federal deficit started under President Bush with the 2 wars.  And it isn’t getting better with President Obama starting a third war.  Tax increases and spending cuts in other parts of our budget will not solve the economic collapse we are headed since those do not deal with stopping the 3 wars.