Issue #1 War Dollars

 

Each year the President and Congress have to come up with a federal budget for the government. They decide how much money they are going to spend on many different federal programs. War dollars is included in this budget, or is supposed to be considered at least. In 2008 the government had spent more than 2.9 trillion dollars on many programs and agencies. The spending is devided into 4 categories: defense, nondefense discretionary, manditory, and interest on the national debt. In 2008 over 600 billion dollars were spent for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.This has caused the national debt to skyrocket. The debt the U.S. has is over 13 trillion dollars, and the ongoing war has only made this number go way up. The war in Iraq and Afghanistan has caused the government spending to skyrocket as well with increased homeland security and all of the military operations going on. All of the deficit records have hit record highs throughout the war.

The amount of money that has been put into the war is astronomically high. Previous to the war the U.S. already had a high national debt, and since the war we have continued to spend insanely large amounts of money trying to defend the country, if that is truly what the war was even about, which i think it had a bit to do with the oil since we went into other places, fighting people who weren't even involved in 9/11. I do however think Bush had a really tough decision on his hands of what to do at such a crisis and something had to be done. War sounded like a good option, and i think it was an okay one but our priorities got a bit mixed up along the way. It was supposed to have been a short easy war to win but after getting sucked into a battle over oil really, here we are 9 years later and we are still over seas fighting. Of course since we are in the war, we can't just stop spending money and get out of there, i realize we need to spend money to have supplies and get things accomplished it is just too bad that it has gone on this long and has caused us to spend so much money that we do not have. It is not fair to tax wealthier Americans way higher amounts of money to try and pay for things like this and as a way to try and cut deficits. A good chunk of the wealthier Americans have worked hard for what they have and deserve what they have, they can't help it that a lot of people are lazy and sit on their butts having tons of kids and living off welfare. The wealthy didn't get that way by being lazy and i feel it is just a cop out to charge them for other people's mistakes and spending issues. I definitely think that Congress should not be able to deny additional funding for war efforts, that should have been discussed before we got ourselves into the war. But since we are over seas fighting you can't just waste all of the lost lives and time by now stopping to pay and support the war. Yes, it is unfortunate and very expensive but we have to keep spending the money to fight and win so we can get out of there with things accomplished. Without the President willing to send more people over to help the troops and fight, more and more people are dying, it is a sign that we cannot just stop helping, we got ourselves in and we need to get ourselves out, we cannot do that by just giving up with helping and take our troops out, it would be ineffective and would cause many more deaths. The U.S. has to commit. In the following article it shows what happened when the President refused to send additional troops over seas. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/54807

Issue #2 Spending What We Can Afford:
http://katieireneiverson.blogspot.com/2010/10/issue-2-spending-what-we-can-afford.html
Issue #3 Social Insecurity:
http://rachelrachrachel.blogspot.com/2010/10/topic-3-social-insecurity.html