Comments on: Spending Priorities

By: XR

XR — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 21:23:20 +0000

Well, with Dubya in charge, what else is new? Spending money without restraints on a war that still does not have a clear exist strategy is not a problem, while raising measily $10 Billion cigarrate tax to help pay for a $300 Billion domestic bill is too much. The war cost is already $1.6 trillion, what’s another $10 B. Especially since we are still borrowing against our chidrenn’s and the children of our children’s future. Whoever says Dubya is thinking any of these through is obviously not thinking themselves.

By: vitrant.org » Blog Archive » Conspiracy ? or Are the Republicans really afraid of a few candidates and other random topics

Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:24:50 +0000

[...] Spending Priorities in the US. I think if you ignore the war vs. natural resources and scroll down a bit. You will see [...]

By: Ahmed

Ahmed — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 11:16:59 +0000

Sean: Before thinking about forcefully bringing about our “democracy” to the world, we would be better off looking at the sad state of things back here. Our most basic rights have been eroded and belittled, our privacy desecrated, and the very democratic foundations our nation built upon (and which we are supposedly trying to spread by invading secular, non-threatening states with crippled armies) have become almost irrelevant to the day-to-day decision making on Capitol Hill. You are unhappy about the money lost – and so am I – but I am a tad unhappier about the fact that after 5 years of insensible war we have managed to get half a million people killed, most of them civilians, and have set back what used to be the scientific center of the middle east (Baghdad) into the middle ages. You cannot educate people by killing them.

And if “democracy, tolerance and prosperity” are what dragged us into having a blundering idiot as head of state for 8 years- a man whose sayings are sold in the comedy section of your bookstore – maybe we need to rethink this whole democracy thing.

By: Money spent on energy research vs. the Iraq war [chart] at pepemosca

Money spent on energy research vs. the Iraq war [chart] at pepemosca — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 07:21:40 +0000

[...] [link][more] [...]

By: Tech Guy Tales

Tech Guy Tales — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 01:43:45 +0000

Hey, why don’t you change the y axis to increase at one dollar at a time, that way you can make the graph even longer!

By: Pedro

Pedro — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:31:41 +0000

democracy?

By: William

William — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 01:21:16 +0000

Yeah, I agree with most of the other commenters. I’m seriously skeptical about that pyramid graphic. I can’t even tell in what terms it means. Percentage of what? Does it include price controls for milk as “subsidies”? The common wisdom, at least as I understand it, is that the biggest subsidies are responsible for the biggest monoculture products: corn, soybeans, and sugar, full stop. Of those, the soybeans are mainly used for the oil, and the corn is mainly of a type used for high fructose corn syrup. I hadn’t even heard of significant subsidies for ranching. Perhaps the maker is including animal feed in the subsidies, in which case meat would concentrate resources by virtue of being higher on the food chain.

It’s big news that the farm bill this year is including more subsidies for fruit and vegetable farming. Of course, “more” still isn’t much, and less in the way of subsidies overall would be far better, but… yeah. That bottom pyramid needs great elucidation.

By: cleek » Spending Priorities

cleek » Spending Priorities — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:49:54 +0000

[...] Spending Priorities, A Graph Filed under: Uncategorized — cleek @ 4:48 pm [...]

By: markk

markk — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 19:51:15 +0000

Re: the pyramids – yes they are extremely misleading. In fact really bad, since they do not include agricultural water subsidy as part of grain or vegetable.
e.g. southeastern CA for example… Include that and the pyramid is actually upside down.

Not that subsidies are good. Of course now that corn prices are going up on their own because of secondary markets, people call it a “crime against humanity” for agricultural product prices to go up. You can’t win either way as a farmer.

Being from Wisconsin we have always laughed at dairy subsidies as if people here wanted them as is. The fact that it was (and is still kind of) true that the farther you were from Eau Claire WI the more dairy subsidy you got, always was good for a laugh.

By: Kapakapa

Kapakapa — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 09:13:35 +0000

And money not spent that should have been spent on Iraq.

Simply assuming if the US were to compensate, say, $30,000 for each life lost, $10,000 for the injured, and $5,000 for the displaced, what would that amount to additional war budget? Pardon the unrealistically cheap scale of compensation.

Robert Dreyfuss recently estimated in November 11, Tom’s Dispatch as follows:
‘There are, by now, perhaps a million dead Iraqis, give or take a few hundred thousand. If a typical wounded-to-dead ratio of 3:1 holds, then you’re talking about up to 4 million war, occupation, and civil-war casualties. Now, add in the estimated 2-2.5 million who went into exile, fleeing the country, and another estimated 2.3 million who have had to leave their homes and go into internal exile as Iraqi communities and neighborhoods were “cleansed.”

The total adds up to a deep, helpless sigh.