What is Reddit's opinion of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

It was an economic and foreign policy disaster, no sugar-coating it.

>Only in the first 6 years and only by 1) collecting taxes for 10 years

I see someone has been falling for Republican propaganda. Read this.

>2) cutting medicare dramatically (while shunting medicare tax revenues into HCR).

The "cuts" to Medicare are to eliminate the corporate welfare program known as Medicare Advantage. That is not a bad thing.

>The CBO also did these estimates at current levels of taxes on 'cadillac plans', which they presumed wouldn't decline in the face of high taxes and a recession (cue laugh track).

>First of all, wtf ever.

Yeah, just dismiss the fact that TARP wasn't the monster you tried to make it out to be.

>Way to divert the subject into a strawman argument that I wasn't even making. I was only saying Obama and Bush agree on TARP. Do you concur? Good, so concede it should be taken off the chart.

Actually, I didn't say they disagreed on TARP. You tried to smear Obama with the "HE VOTED FOR TARP" thing, as if it is conventional wisdom that TARP was a failure. I was pointing out that your implication is incorrect.

>He's used extremely strong language against Iran

ooOOOOOoo. Because that is equivalent to being a warmonger. The US uses extremely strong language all of the time with our enemies. That doesn't mean we are going to invade them without provocation like Bush did with Iraq.

>he's talked about invading Pakistan's taliban occupied areas while on the campaign trail

As I said, the Taliban does not distinguish between one side of the border or the other, so why should we give them the opportunity to play shoot and duck? We are already in a war there, so trying to actually defeat the enemy doesn't seem like warmongering to me. It seems like common fucking sense.

>he's dramatically increased defense spending.

Did he really? Because I've seen the exact opposite.

>And by the way, not all of us believe nuclear disarmament is conducive to peace.

His "eliminate nukes" thing is just rhetoric. But arms reductions to a certain point are not a bad thing. In particular, he has avoided an arms race that Bush was on the verge of creating with the Poland missile defense system.

>He didn't hold public office back then.

Wrong.

>Regardless of what he says on paper, things may have been different had he held office.

Once again, this is meaningless garbage.

>We've seen him backtrack on civil liberties

Be more specific. I'm pissed about some of the filings the DOJ has made to protect the Bush administrations secrecy (which I think is a political move to avoid an inquisition into the real abuses of the Bush years), but overall he is certainly better than Bush in this regard. I haven't seen Obama shoving tea partiers into "free speech zones" and the FCC is now focusing on broadband improvement rather than censorship of Janet Jackson's nipple.

>Iraq

Already covered this.

>Guantanamo.

Uh, he has been trying to close the prison ever since he got in there. He has had opposition from all sides on the issue because people seem to think that our supermax facility in Colorado is somehow less safe for bad guy storage than Guantanamo. Pay attention.

>You even said he rolled over on defense spending due to "ridiculous political climate" (that excuses him how, exactly?)

It doesn't excuse him so much as just state that anyone in power in the US will do this crap.

>I only said about the Iraq war that it was a relatively small amount of the budget, then I proved it with a source. You did not disagree.

I'll disagree now. If you take into account the total opportunity cost, which includes lost domestic productivity of reserve soldiers fighting in Iraq, the increased medical bills for the wounded, the off-budget accounting tricks Bush played, the fact that it is funded by borrowing, etc., the war was much higher than your "relatively small" claim.

>Are you seriously discounting this? Many people think that if Iran develops a nuke that there will be some sort of action taken, likely akin to Carter's actions at the American embassy in Iran (only hopefully more successful, and possibly through a proxy like Israel). As for a full-scale invasion, I haven't heard of anyone saying that.

My guess is that if Iran develops a nuke (or if it gets close more likely), Israel will act whether Obama wants them to or not. That will not be Obama's fault though. However, I'm not as worried about this situation. The fact that Iran is bragging about 5 kilograms of 20% enriched uranium means they really aren't close at all. They aren't even as far as the United States was in 1943. That and they don't have the delivery systems to be a real threat compared to Israel's hundreds of nukes or the US's thousands of nukes.

>I said, specifically that "Even if he didn't cut taxes, he'd probably still enact some sort of stimulus program that would've likely been comparable to Bush's tax cuts."

>See, notice I acknowledge he may not have cut taxes. I'm absolutely positive however that he would've enacted some sort of multi-hundred-billion dollar stimulus without raising taxes to try and compensate...

To say they would've been comparable means they would have had a similar effect on the budget. That is complete and utter horseshit. Even the 2009 stimulus, which was for a much larger recession, does not come close to the long term effects of the Bush tax cuts (as the chart linked above shows). There is absolutely no reason to think that an Obama tax rebate program or something similar in 2001 would have the same budget costs.

>oh, and he voted for TARP.

And I already demonstrated how TARP was not nearly as expensive as people think. Therefore, this claim is empty.

>He has not cut spending to any other parts government

Inaccurate. Total spending is up, but some parts of the government have been slashed significantly.

>Thank you for that stretch, Barney Frank (calling you that because I heard that earlier today... from him).

I agree with Frank that deregulation was obviously more harmful than the porn. However, the porn statement was a metaphor for the fact that Bush's SEC was asleep at the wheel. They did not catch Madoff until it was too late. And the amount of mortgage fraud that occured on their watch was absolutely staggering.

>You're declaring "no contest" after 1.5 years in which he personally signed an additional $200b/yr in added debt (just in that time period), preceded by him in the senate voting for TARP ($150b/yr so far) and others.

If Bush would have done a decent job of governing, the recession wouldn't have happened or at least wouldn't have been as bad. Therefore, all of this is moot. Let's see how Obama does in good times. Bush proved that he knew how to squander good times.

And yes, so far it is no contest. Bush has the Iraq war, the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, Medicare Part D, and the effects of the recession on his shoulders.

>Give it time, I'm sure Obama will suck enough even for kool-aid drinkers like yourself to admit he sucks...

Time will tell. But so far I've seen him take a country that was on the brink of economic collapse and see GDP and job growth back in positive terrority while at the same time passing nearly-universal health care, massively increasing science funding, negotiating arms treaties, adding consumer protections to credit cards, and capturing Taliban leaders. Not bad for 15 months. Maybe you should change Kool-Aid flavors. The Ron Paul flavor (or whatever it is you drink) is tastes like rotten apples.

>Edit: I'd also add that this chart you posted also doesn't take into account that Obama has done nothing serious to curtail the deficit (apart from a few toothless tax increases) source. As a result, within the first 3 years of Obama's administration, the debt will rise more than it did in Bush's 8.

Obama can't raise taxes while the economy is still recovering from Bush's mess. As I said, wait to see how he does during good times. If he does anything like our last Democratic president, we will probably be fine. Last thing you should know: never trust the Heritage Foundation. That is just a dumb thing to do.

I take your point.

It's still not a certainty that the United States even survives the Trump administration. To take one scenario, what if Trump loses the next election but simply refuses to leave office (claiming his loss was a "hoax")?

But GWB wasted at least $3 trillion in Iraq. USA would be strategically better off if he had simply set the money on fire. Now we're supposed to like him again because he's folksy. Sorry, no.

For now, Trump is still the better President.

Jon Stewart can't decide if he wants to be a comedian or a public intellectual and in the mean time he sucks at both. He was in "Half Baked," though, so he's still getting into heaven on that alone.

EDIT: Delicious data sauces

• https://watson.brown.edu/research/2018/59-trillion-spent-and-obligated-post-911-wars

• https://www.amazon.com/Three-Trillion-Dollar-War-Conflict/dp/0393067017

One of the reasons that the Iraq war was a problem was because Bush refused to raise taxes to pay for a war he started and just borrowed to pay for it like a credit card.

some of the debt was even hidden by accounting tricks.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Three-Trillion-Dollar-War/dp/0393067017

Had the war never started then the US's fiscal situation would be a lot better.