A recent post, Bring The Economy Home, discussed the abysmal lack of loyalty the Afghanistan government had toward the U.S.Hey, if the top general there made contemptuous comments about the civilian government in the U.S., why can't Afghan government officials?
Now that the top U.S. general there has been removed of his command, and another put in his place (who agreed to the President's plan to begin to draw down in a year) lets look at the economics.
The cost of 1 U.S. soldier for 1 year in Afghanistan is $1,000,000 according to an article in The Hill.
There are now about 100,000 soon to be 130,000 troops there, so that equates to 2,000,000 jobs paying $50,000 a year here at home (100,000 x $1,000,000 / $50,000).
There are more contractors there who cost more than a soldier, twice as much or so, but lets be conservative and show that those figures convert into 4,000,000 jobs paying $50,000 a year here at home (100,000 x $2,000,000 / $50,000).
Combined that equates to 6,000,000 jobs.
These are only very rough estimates and don't add up to the other figures the government gives us, so they are offered only as an example of errant spending, not exact economics.
Throw in Iraq and 1,000 military bases around the world, and it should become obvious that we should BRING THE ECONOMY HOME.
UPDATE: Read the continuation of this post here, where it is shown that billions of dollars of cash is being flown from Afghanistan to Dubai where corrupt Afghan officials are purchasing real estate with that stolen U.S. taxpayer money.
Dredd,
ReplyDeleteThere you go making OLD sense again. Actually the NEW sense is that jobs are global. They naturally flow to where costs are lowest.
In the NEW sense, military jobs are cheap, since they naturally skim from the bottom of the US labor pool. And oh, by the way, they ALSO make extensive use of either blatant or quasi-illegal immigrant labor to do so. Expect that trend to continue and multiply exponentially, as the results of war continue to be "off-shored" along with all the rest of American capitalism's excesses.
Yeah, the myth that wars are free even made its way to the bushie budget for years, which lowered the deficit because we ignored the war-cost column.
ReplyDeleteThat's the ticket ... just leave the war costs off the budget and lower the deficit that way.
Paygo evolves into play pretend as we go merrily over the cliff.
If 6,000,000 people were paid $50,000 a year working on fixing schools here, fixing and updating the power grid, and on infrastructure, we would be better off than we are using it to destroy in order to save Afghanistan.