President Barack Obama tried turning a speech about a war into a speech about money last week.
It was clearly an awkward transition, mainly because Americans are simply not comfortable making hard choices between buying Humvees for soldiers and paying Grandma’s nursing home bills.
We are emotionally connected to both Grandma and our GIs, and are loathe to put a price tag on either, which is one of the reasons we now have a $13.5 trillion national debt. We just can’t say “no.”
President John F. Kennedy set the bar for a generation when it came to detaching our enthusiasm for war from the reality of paying for it.
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty,” he said.
A truly great Kennedy quote, but ANY burden? ANY hardship? Really?
To say the War on Terror has been a burden would be putting it lightly: More than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead, more than 30,000 injured and more than $1 trillion spent, and an inconclusive victory to show for it.
Except for World War II, it has become the most expensive war in U.S. history in inflation-adjusted dollars. And it’s not over yet.
At the time President George Bush committed troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, most Americans — and nearly all members of Congress — were firmly behind him.
This was a collective decision. We made it and we were committed.
And, once committed, it becomes extremely difficult to extract ourselves from the commitment. The enemy, unfortunately, was not obliged to obey the pre-war predictions of quick and easy victory.
But the trade-offs have been real and sobering.
First, there’s simply the lost opportunity cost. More than 1 million Americans have served in Iraq, all in the prime of their lives. What could they have contributed to our economic security and productivity if we had not had them otherwise engaged?
Then, of course, there are those who have died or been injured. More than 4,000 of our fellow citizens are gone, thousands of others will suffer disabilities for decades to come.
Then there’s the actual cost of fighting the war: $1 trillion, a nearly unfathomable number.
What else could we have done with that money? Better protected our borders? Repaired our crumbling infrastructure? Sent more of our kids to college? Incurred less federal debt? Stabilized Social Security and Medicare?
At the time we undertook these wars, we could also not have known the economic disaster that lay ahead. The government was running budget surplus in the early part of the Bush administration.
We didn’t anticipate spending another trillion dollars bailing out banks, auto companies, mortgage giants and stimulating the economy, and just as tax revenue went into a tailspin.
Like they say, a trillion here, a trillion there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Of course, they used to say that about a billion … and, before that, a million.
Clearly, as the president said, its “time to turn the page.”
It is.
We are slowly coming to the realization that our economic strength is as important, perhaps more important, than our military might.
Al-Qaida is a threat. But so is the lost family business, the lost job or the lost retirement savings.
It is indeed time to rebuild our strength at home.
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