Iraq war 'caused slowdown in the US'
Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has stated that the war in Iraq is responsible for the problems currently afflicting the US economy. He says that the war has cost 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and that, as a direct result of those costs, US banks sought to counter the financial drain of the war on the economy by flooding the market with cheap credit.
"The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," he said.
That led to a housing bubble and a consumption boom, and the fallout was plunging the US economy into recession and saddling the next US president with the biggest budget deficit in history, he said.
He also points out the other things that could have been done with such a gargantuan amount of money.
The money being spent on the war each week would be enough to wipe out illiteracy around the world, he said.
Just a few days' funding would be enough to provide health insurance for US children who were not covered, he said.
And he also reminds us that lies concerning WMD were not the only lies we were told before this conflict began.
The public had been encouraged by the White House to ignore the costs of the war because of the belief that the war would somehow pay for itself or be paid for by Iraqi oil or US allies.
"When the Bush administration went to war in Iraq it obviously didn't focus very much on the cost. Larry Lindsey, the chief economic adviser, said the cost was going to be between $US100billion and $US200 billion - and for that slight moment of quasi-honesty he was fired.
"(Then defence secretary Donald) Rumsfeld responded and said 'baloney', and the number the administration came up with was $US50 to $US60 billion. We have calculated that the cost was more like $US3 trillion.
"Three trillion is a very conservative number, the true costs are likely to be much larger than that."
Five years after the war, the US was still spending about $US50billion every three months on direct military costs, he said.
There really is no way to overstate the damage that the Bush administration have done to the US, not only to her standing in the world community, but even to the extent of inflicting a crippling blow to her economy by waging reckless war whilst continuing to give tax cuts to her richest citizens.
It is no surprise that Bush is now the least popular President since polling began. Thanks to him the next US President will inherit a broken economy, a crippling deficit, and a nation more hated around the globe than at any other time in it's history, with the possible exception of the time of the Vietnam war.
It's a scandalous record, and the fact that McCain apparently wants to campaign for more of the same, shows that the Republicans really have no idea of just what they have done.
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