Iraq: $720 Million Each Day

Is it worth it?

A person’s spend­ing habits tells you what he val­ues. The same holds true in gov­ern­ment. If you want to see where a mayor, gov­er­nor or president’s pri­or­i­ties lie, look at his bud­get pro­posal — par­tic­u­larly any changes from the last year or pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tion. Bud­get­ing is usu­ally a zero-sum game. In gen­eral, a city, state or coun­try has a lim­ited amount of money to spend (unless you want to keep increas­ing your debt, like the United States), and the admin­is­tra­tion needs to pri­or­i­tize items from a vir­tu­ally unlim­ited list of needs and wants.

Take this exam­ple. Say you have $100. Divy up that $100 among the fol­low­ing areas: pub­lic works, edu­ca­tion, health care, hous­ing con­struc­tion, aid to the home­less, defense, busi­ness invest­ment and wel­fare. You’ll soon real­ize that the level of money you allo­cate to each cat­e­gory will reflect your val­ues (as well as the polit­i­cal real­i­ties of the day). Now increase the num­ber to $3 tril­lion and the num­ber of pro­grams to 10,000.

This can get very messy — I don’t envy the peo­ple in gov­ern­ment who make these decisions. Every sin­gle pro­gram and need has its advo­cates inside and out­side of gov­ern­ment. If you give more money to one pro­gram, you’ll need to cut money from another. If you pri­or­i­tize defense over wel­fare, you’ll be accused of ignor­ing the needy. If you pri­or­i­tize wel­fare over defense, you’ll be accused of not car­ing about the safety of Amer­i­can fam­i­lies. And every­one always wants more money.

This is one of the main rea­sons that I am so angry about the Iraq war. The amount of money spent on this con­flict shows where the Bush administration’s true pri­or­i­ties lie. The White House wanted to invade and occupy Iraq, so it found a way to pay for it (mainly by bank­rupt­ing the coun­try). If the White House, for example, had wanted to improve edu­ca­tion or health care in the United States, it would have found a way to pay for that. But Pres­i­dent Bush chose war — and an unnec­es­sary one, at that.

Else­where: Slate’s Fred Kaplan says Con­gress should ask tough ques­tions about the Pentagon’s bud­get.