Barnett on Drum on Barnett

Barnett reveiws Kevin Drum's review of PNM:

COMMENTARY: Talk about frustrating! Through the several hundred footnotes and the reams of statistics, I never seem to offer any proof, only description (and damnit, he already knows all that stuff, smart fellow that he is). Whenever I hear someone's "slogged" through a book (ask yourself why he felt compelled to say that), what I know is that they couldn't access the material so they skimmed it quickly. That's why he misses arguments I make, such as a very specific one about World War I. Clearly, I didn't write the nation-building book he wanted here, and that frustrates him.

If a grand strategic vision allows for Iraq, then Drum's not on board. He admits he's bitching harshly because PNM doesn't scratch his itch directly, but does he ask himself why so many people have urged him to read the book? Perhaps they're just simpletons who fall for Tom Friedmanism. Ah well, there are definitely worse authors to be compared to.

Barnett's half right: he didn't write the nation building book Kevin wanted:

I feel like I'm being unfairly harsh toward Barnett, who seems like a good guy who's been thinking about this stuff for a long time. But in the end, the problem wasn't that he failed to persuade me, it was that he didn't even try. I kept waiting for the argument to start, but instead I just kept getting more and more description. Sure, the Gap is unstable and disconnected, but can American power connect it? Yes, we can wage war unilaterally if we want to, but can we also get the rest of the Core to follow our lead if we do? Maybe evangelizing globalization to the Gap is a good thing, but is it enough to stop war? It didn't stop World War I. And what's required in addition to military power anyway? Barnett never really says.

Leaving aside the WWI spat, what Drum really wanted was for Barnett to make the case that nation-building works. Anything we do today will not turn out like Japan or Germany after WW2; but since then our record is not very good. If we leave Iraq and Afghanistan in the same condition we left Somalia and Haiti, Barnett's great Wilsonian project is futile at best and catastrophic at worst. But if we get Bosnia or Kosovo, well, that's not too bad. Drum seems to agree that Barnett's IDEAS are good - but the important question is whether they can be successfully implemented.

In that respect, I suppose there's two answers. First, is the one I've made before, which is that Barnett's argument and the PowerPoint presentation were developed for a military audience which needed to be sold on the ideas first: China is not a threat, the US will (and should) be involved in non-peer Gap actions, nation-building cannot be avoided or ignored - it is necessary, and long-term security will only come by shrinking the Gap. The book grew out of that, so the book is focussed on the ideas. Drum, coming from a more liveral-internationalist perspective, probably agreed with the ideas already - he's more concerned about implementation.

But second, I think it's too early to tell if the project is worthwhile. The costs are high, even ignoring the certain-to-come-but-as-yet-unforseen. Lives, dollars, and opportunities are all lost - but it is too early to see the gains. Do we really see the end of the Israel-Palestine problem in sight? Are we on the verge of liberalization in Lebanon and Egpyt? Will that be all, or will popular movements spread to Syria, Iran, Libya (Qaddafi's not immortal, after all), or the Gulf? If so, we may see 5 years hence what was unimaginable 5 years ago: raw democracy, in all it's chaotic glory, stretching from Egypt to Afghanistan.

And where do those snow-balls roll from there? Turkish accession to the EU will shatter barriers, open doors, and raise questions: why not extend the EU at least as far as old Rome, to North Africa, Egypt, and Mesopotamia?

But that future is not inevitable: it must be built. At some point incompetence and ignorance will catch up with Mr. Bush. If Barnett is our architect of the future, Bush is clearly not the best choice for a general contractor - even Barnett realized that. So Drum's concern is valid: if we concede that the plans are are good, shouldn't we also be concerned about WHO follows them?

Credit where it's due

I know Ed's a bit more partican than Josh, but really. Can't we admit that the Lebanese popular movement is happening because of two things: America's involvement in Iraq and the death of Yasser Arafat? Ed insists that this is merely post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning, and that Bush deserves no special credit. Now, that's probably true with respect to Libya and Qaddafi's decision to abandon his nuclear program. After all, at the time, lots of sources were detailing the long history of US back-channel efforts to make it happen, stretching back at least until the Clinton years. And even if Qaddafi only relented at the end because he thought a newly bellicose US would quickly tire of him and move against his regime, he would probably have reached that conclusion after the Afghan invasion (with a little sabre rattling and arm twisting) even without the US actually invading Iraq. Indeed, following the invasion, our threats became LESS credible because the enourmous opportunity cost of the invasion and occupation necessarily limited our ability to act against other states. For a good example, see Sudan, Darfur crisis.

But Syria is another matter, and one of the arguments neocons (and others, like Barnett) have made is that Iraqi democracy will create a "big bang" in the region. The demonstration effect of Muslim Arabs engaging in open political competiton will, so the argument goes, create HUGE pressure within other countries to democratize. The floodgates will open, just in Eastern Europe in 1989.

Of course, there's lots of important differences between Eastern Europe in 1989 and Southwest Asia in 2005. Most importantly, in 1989, there was only one actor that gave legitimacy to the authoritarian governments of the Warsaw pact: the USSR. When Gorbachev made clear that he was not going to intervene to prevent East Germans from fleeing to the West through Austria and Hungary, that left the Soviet client regimes with no popular support and no willingness to use force against their own people. In contrast, the Mid East has no such central authority. Each state apparatus relies only on its own security and military services, and enjoys support from at least SOME segments of the population. Lebanon is perhaps the country that most resembles the situation of 1989, but even there, Assad has not credibly renounced intervention in internal Lebanese politics.

The Iraqi invasion, despite the staggering incompetence of all non-uniformed Administration officials involved, has had several important follow-on effects. First, no more Saddam. Saddam was the leader of his peer group: the biggest bully, the biggest mouth, the biggest ego, the biggest bankroll. He fought the wars, he paid off the suicide bombers, he played the Americans both ways - as allies against Iran, but still to keeping (so he suggested) his nukes despite 12 years of pressure following the Gulf War. Without Saddam, holding the Palestinian elections in the wake of Arafat's death was easier, as was striking a deal with Isreal over Gaza. The Palestinians had sufficient prior experience with elections that they would probably have occured, but Saddam's continued intervention in the disputes would have made the openning for peace following Arafat's death much smaller. Second, no Saddam means that the US no longer needs Syria to contain him. Relying on Syria gave Assad a freer hand in Lebanon. Third, no Saddam means the US is not tied to the embargo and its bases in Saudi Arabia. OF course, we've replaced those with other unpopular policies, but at least the new policies resulted in free elections.

The appropriate counterfactual is this: had the US not invaded Iraq, is there any reason why Mubarak would promise somewhat open elections and the Syrian-backed Lebanese government would fall? I think the answer is clearly "no."

How much return do you need?

Under the Bush Plan, your "private account" held by the government suffers a 3% "clawback". As discussed elsewhere, first your benefits are cut (Cut #1). Then your benefits are cut again (Cut #2), your payroll taxes are diverted to the account, and when you retire, the account balance is used to purchase an annuity that provides minimum benefits - anything over that is "yours".

Supposedly, the returns on your account will be so large that you'll get more than you lost in Cut #2.* The Bushies make the assumption that since the Trust Fund is invested in T-bills at 3%, your account would be equivalent to the lost Cut #2 benefits if you just invested in T-bills. So they'll take that 3% out of your account to pay for the annuity - and if you happen to make 5%, then you pocket the extra 2%. (Even this is a gross oversimplification, and makes the Bush plan look better than it really is.)

Problem: 3% is only a sufficient return for the Trust Fund as a whole. Since individual wage earners would get varying rates of return under SS, they would need more or less than 3% to make up for the benefits lost in Cut #2. See this Cato study about rates of return.

Examples:

• Tom is a single 25 yo male, and makes $100 K. Only his first ~$90K is subject to SS. Because he's so young (and a guy), his after-tax return on his SS contributions is 2.8% - less than 3%. If he makes 5% return a year, he'll get his annuity AND pocket that 2.2% at retirement to live well.
• Mary is a single 25 yo female, making $100K. But her expected return is about 3.88%. If she made the same 5% a year, she'd only pocket 1.2%! But at least she gets something in addition to the annuity.
• Robert is a single 25 yo male, making $20K a year. His expected return to SS is 4.91%. If he made a 5% return, he'd end up with only .09% to live on beyond his traditional benefit.
• Jane is a single 25 yo female, making $20K a year. Her expected return from SS is 5.68%. Even if she makes a 5% return, she can't replace all her lost benefits. She's just SOL.
• Sarah is a single 25 yo female, making only $10K a year (when she works - she's a single mom). Her expected benefit from SS is 6.75%. Even if she made the 6.5% pipe dream of the privatisers, she'd still be doing worse.
  

Notice that unlike traditional SS, greater benefits accrue to the wealthy than than poor - and the very poor are actually worse off, even if they make 5% returns! And these are just younger workers. Rates of return for older worker are substantially more impressive, especially when considered after taxes**:

Table 5 After-Tax Rate of Return for 65-Year Olds On Social Security Contributions (Percent)
Single			Joint
Income Level ($)	Male	Female	One Earner	Two Earners (50/50)	Two Earners (60/40)
10,000	9.38	10.02	11.24	11.02	10.93
20,000	8.42	9.13	10.37	9.72	9.79
30,000	8.05	8.77	10.16	9.14	9.18
50,000	6.57	7.54	9.78	8.51	8.57
70,000	6.41	7.40	9.00	7.68	7.70
100,000	6.41	7.40	8.97	7.11	7.20

There's no way that these kind of returns will be made up in the market - I don't care if your a psychic buyin' lottery tickets! The privatisers have such a low opinion of SS based on their own (rich) expereince that they don't realise that it's actually a very good deal. It's even a pretty good deal for them when their close to retirement!

*But not Cut #1 - you're just not gettin' that back. Get over it.
**Admittedly, any "add-on private account" would be tax-deferred or tax-free. But the pre-tax numbers are pretty good too.

Would you buy a retirement from this man?

As you know, the trust fund is just excess payroll taxes, collected into an account for future SS beneficiaries. Every year, the SSA sends out statements telling every American how much they would get at retirement, financed out of that government-administered account. The Trust Fund was kept off-budget with a distinct accounting mechanism to ensure that it wouldn't be raided. In order to maintain it's promise to workers, the Trust Fund would invest in the safest, most secure asset in the world: U.S. Treasury bonds. Statutes exist to protect it, and to ensure that when it is needed, the "special obligations" it holds will be paid. For a long time, it wasn't even included in the "budget deficit" calculations. But, politicians being what they are, the money was subsequently "loaned" to the General Fund to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy - but still with the promise that it would be paid back. Until now.

As Josh Marshall reports today, Bush says the trust fund doesn't exist. All the obligations are just a big hoax - there's no real money.

But what Bush DOES think is that if the government takes your payroll taxes, puts them into a government-administered account, sends you statements every year about how much you would get when you retire, invests in mostly safe and secure assets, and promises to keep this pot of money off-budget with distinct accounting mechanisms so that when you need it will be there.... well - THIS TIME it's gonna be there!

Would you buy a retirement plan from this man?

50 Yr Trust Fund: SS "Crisis" Officially Ends

The CBO's updated Long Term Social Security Projections are out - SUPRISE! (Heads up from Josh Marshall) The choice bits are on page 3:

Under current law, outlays begin to exceed revenues starting in 2020; starting in 2053 scheduled benefits cannot be paid.

The "crisis" has been pushed back another year!? Now we have 15 years until the break-even point, up from 14 last year. Amazingly, we've still got 48 years until the Trust Fund is exhausted - same as last year, when CBO estimated exhaustion in 2052. Compared to the SS Acturaries estimate of only 37 more years (38 years, last year), that's more than a 25% increase - 11years! That's right - the CBO is predicting that the Trust Fund will last almost 50 years. I think Kevin needs to update his chart.

But wait - there's more!

Revenues include payroll taxes and income taxes on benefits but exclude interest credited to the Social Security trust funds; outlays include scheduled Social Security benefits and administrative costs.

Of course, interest IS credited to the Trust Fund every year for the government bonds it buys. The chart on page two indicates that SS will end up with a persistent shortfall of 2% of GDP, which would amount to 25% of projected outlays. If you include the interest, the TF should last at least 100 years.

The Ratio?

Now, if you look at page 5, you get a nice scare graph: the "Trust Fund Ratio". I've never heard of it before, but that doesn'e mean much. Anyway, it sure is ominous: now at 3, the "Ratio" rises to 5 before falling through zero in 2053. Then it accelerates, hitting -7 in 2075 and -20 by 2100. Oh No! -20!?! That's a big number - must be bad. But what's the Ratio?

The trust fund ratio is the ratio of the total trust fund balance at the beginning of a calendar year to total Social Security outlays in that year.

So is the CBO predicting that in 2065, when the Ratio is about -5, projected SS outlays will be five times larger than projected SS revenues (payroll taxes and income taxes paid on SS benefits)? No. That'd be a ratio of 1:5, or 0.2 - a very small but positive number. To get a negative Ratio, the CBO must be comparing projected outlays to some cumulative hypothetical Trust Fund debt - i.e. if there's insufficient revenue in 2054 because the TF is exhausted, then the 2055 Ratio is the ratio of 2055's outlays to the shortfall of 2054. The -5 Ratio in 2065 means that outlays in 2065 will be five times larger than the aggregate shortfall of all years from 2055-2065.

Except that's not how the system works. Once the Trust Fund runs dry, if no additional General Fund revenues are spent on SS, then the SSA just imposes a uniform benefit cut on everyone - current projections are that SS would still pay about 75% of promised benefits, even before tallying the interest on TF-held T-Bonds. There's no on-going fiscal obligation to make up for those promised benefits once the TF is exhausted (although it'd be nice), so the Ratio after 2053 should be ZERO.

And that's exactly what the intro text on page 1 and the comment below the graph on page 7 say. Page 7 has "Median First- Year Retirement Benefits, by Birth Cohort":

Current law benefits fall below scheduled benefits beginning in 2053, when the trust funds are exhausted. Thereafter benefits are projected by assuming an across-the-board cut in benefits each year such that total annual benefits are limited to total annual revenues.

So much for the Ratio.

I also like the way the graphs on pages 7, 8, and 9, which reflect reductions in benefits paid between 2040 and 2070 to workers BORN between 1980 and 2000, give the visual impression that benefits are being cut NOW.

Iraq: Too Early To Tell

Iraq's election was a success. Turnout over 60% nationwide, and a newly elected government to begin the task of drafting a constitution. Sunni leaders have already made clear they want to participate in that process, despite their boycott of the election, and the three-province veto means they'll be able to.

• American Military Deaths: 1432 reported at icasualties.org
  
• American non-Military Deaths: 74
  
• Coalition Military Deaths: 171
  
• Coalition non-Military Deaths: 132
  
• Iraqi Deaths, Lancet Study: 8,000-196,000 @ 95% confidence, as of September 2004 (pre-Fallujah II)
  
• US cost: $300 bn.
  
• Coalition cost: unknown
  
• Iraqi cost: unknowable

Was it worth it? As Mao said of the French Revolution, "It's too early to tell." There is no way to know right now if the new government will be stable, if democracy will take root, if security will return. What will the region-wide cultural and political ramifications of three Middle Eastern elections be? The differences between what has happened and the status quo ante are immense. If Saddam were still in power, exploiting the embargo, paying off the families of suicide bombers, and thumbing his nose at the US, what would have been the fate of the Palestinian elections? If our effort fails, we will have spent our blood and treasure and received only chaos and death. If it succeeds, we will have brought freedom to 25 million Iraqis and transformed the region. How long will the despots last in Syria, Iran, and Egypt when Iraqis and Palestinians are freely electing and criticizing their leaders? It will not happen in two years or three, but five? ten? We must wait and see.

Democracy survives by surviving - the longer that the habits and norms of democracy are followed, respected, and reinforced, the stronger they become. Iraqis, Afghanis, and Palestinians have all voted in mostly fair elections - and every day that their governments survive (and do not revert to authoritarianism) is another victory, a further reason to hope.

The Middle East of 2002 was a fundamentally broken society; fixing it was going to be painful, bloody, and expensive. We have shattered the old order, but the new has yet to emerge. As yet, I cannot say that things are better or worse, only that they have been painful, bloody, and expensive. Although the signs are hopeful, it is too early to tell.

Whodunit?

USA Today: Anonymous message spurs calls to Capitol Hill

Thousands of people called Capitol Hill and local offices this week after receiving an anonymous, recorded message that said their representatives support "privatizing Social Security." Recipients were given a toll-free number that connected them to the Capitol. The number belonged to the American Federation of Teachers, which said its line was hijacked.

The recorded message reached people in at least 17 Republican congressional districts in 13 states and may have gone out to more than two dozen districts, says House Republican Conference spokesman Greg Crist.

...

The teachers union, whose toll-free number was given in the message, says the number was stolen. It disconnected the line Thursday. "We don't know anything about this," spokeswoman Janet Bass said.

Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite's Florida district was among those targeted by what she called "tele-scare tactics." She got nearly 300 calls. "It's despicable," she said.

So, who dunit? AFT certainly didn't do it. Was it GOP, looking for sympathy and pinning the blame on teachers? Or was it tricky Dems? Was this about the meta-media message of "dirty tricks by anti-privatizers", or was it (also?) about the calls themselves? Of course, if it's dirty, it's not because of the message (which is largely true), but only because it used the AFT number.

All those calls to sensitive GOP districts, using aggressive "privatization" language, could seriously backfire if this was a GOP operation. To me, that's what makes this a probably pro-SS campaign. You can get the same media mileage with a LOT less than 300 calls to a single district.

Asshole

Ward Churchill, an "ethnic studies" professor at U. Colorado - Boulder, argues that the WTC and Pentagon victims of 9-11 were not "innocent", but rather the attacks were chickens coming home to roost.

Churchill's essay argues that the Sept. 11 attacks were in retaliation for the Iraqi children killed in a 1991 U.S. bombing raid and by economic sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations following the Persian Gulf War.

The essay contends the hijackers who crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11 were "combat teams," not terrorists.

It states: "The most that can honestly be said of those involved on Sept. 11 is that they finally responded in kind to some of what this country has dispensed to their people as a matter of course."

The essay maintains that the people killed inside the Pentagon were "military targets."

"As for those in the World Trade Center," the essay said, "well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break."

The essay goes on to describe the victims as "little Eichmanns," referring to Adolph Eichmann, who executed Adolph Hitler's plan to exterminate Jews during World War II.

Troubling for his thesis that none of the hijackers was Iraqi, that a quarter of the WTC victims weren't US citizens, that many were service workers not employed in the genocidal oppressive bond-trading machine of US capitalism (responsible for killing Iraqi children -- huh?) but worked in the Windows on the World restaurant or for the Port Authority, or were police and firefighters, or were on the airplanes, etc... In fact, very few of the victims were involved with Wall Street directly - despite the iconic status of the towers, most of the WTC businesses were involved in TRADE - imports and exports, not stock and bond markets.

Assholery chooses no sides on the fringes of left and right.

Comment Spam Bastards

It's getting out of hand. Checkout this randomly selected post from Political Animal six months ago. 243 comments, of which the last 65 are all spam. 16 trackbacks, of which 3 are spam.

Most of it's for PageRanks, so the Google rel=nofollow option might put a stop to that, as long as other search engines also support the tag, bloggers use it, and spammers (a) know that it thwarts them, and (b) know when blogs use it.

But there's no guarantee of that - the chinese language spammers, for example, probably don't read anything on the page. In fact, nobody would read the warnings - comment spam clearly has been automated somehow. That's probably easier on blogs with sequentially numbered posts, to hit all the archives, or RSS feeds to get all the new posts. That suggests that even blogs that add "nofollow" will see spam once they get on a spammer's list, just like spammers send spam email to dead addresses and unused accounts.

The dog-food idiots are spamming every comment thread within 24 hours, with paragraph-length readable posts that seem vaguely on-topic, are grammatically correct and appropriately punctuated, and even include a news article cite. Why do this?

First, because systems like Haloscan are putting in comment-filters and the more comment-like the spam is, the more likely it will slip through.

Second, because more blogs like RealClimate or Brad DeLong's blog are going to a 'comment preview' system, where comments are reviewed before they are posted. This type of filter, while more precise, grows tiresome. Again, spam that looks like real comments is more likely to get through.

Third, and most important, because the dog-food spam is probably NOT just about page-rank. Why go to the effort of readable spam, posted within 24 hours of a thread openning? Eyeballs. Anyone with an RSS reader could get the first or second post and some commenters try to do so. An automated system could do nearly as well. Yet the dog-food comments appear several hours (and posts) later. Clearly, the spammer knows that if his ad is stuck in the middle of the comment thread, the discussion is more likley to continue and readers will see it -- and click through to his site. This is troubling because it means that "nofollow" will NOT stop this type of spammer. Only disabling comment hyperlinks altogether would do that.

Solutions for bloggers?

1. Close comments after 24 or 48 hours. If the comments discussion is really good, keep it going with another post. Anything really interesting will migrate to another blog.
2. Police your comments and trackbacks ruthlessly - delete the spam that slips through. This will also make it easier to post followups and extend discussions - even to respond to posters.
3. Use visual-confirmation systems like Pandagon's, where you have to type letters or numbers in a graphic that can't be machine-read.
4. Registration systems will work, but only if coupled with #3 for users. Without an unscriptable step, automated account-creation will eventually allow spammers to create many fake registrations.
5. Use "no-follow" - it might help some, and if you're not seeing comment spam yet it might innoculate you from the PageRank-spammer lists.
6. Trackback service providers need to agree to prevent trackback spam by banning or removing spammers, and also by creating a way to retro-actively delete all of a spammer's past trackpack ping entries, preferably across multiple trackback services.
   

Whither Medicare?

Once again, why aren't we talking about Medicare? The Economist noted a few weeks ago (sub req'd) that Bush's Medicare drug benefit ALONE has obligations with a present value twice the $10 trn figure for Social Security.

Social Security is on an unsustainable trajectory, one that goes well beyond the retirement of the baby-boomers. It is not an immediate “crisis”. In fact, payroll-tax revenues will exceed pension payments until 2018, masking America's overall fiscal imbalance. Nor is it America's biggest long-term fiscal problem. The financial burden from Medicare will be much bigger. Mr Bush's first-term decision to introduce a prescription-drug benefit for retirees worsened Medicare's long-term financial imbalance by more than twice as much as the entire Social Security problem.

And Medicare runs out of money well before 2043! So why do we need to "fix" Social Security?

Budget Horrors

Thanks to Kevin for the nice NYT chart:

As Max Sawicky pointed out yesterday, we need to look at the likely results. Max offers a great chart on probable outcomes, as percent of GDP:

The general thrust is that Bush wants to extend the tax cuts, and he's going to have to reform the AMT. There's lots more money to spend on the War on Terror too. Thanks to the CBO's new 2005 report, we know most of these costs already - they're in the report on other pages, left as an exercise for the reader. When you add it all up, we find no reduction in the deficit. When we look only at the General Fund (GF):, it's running $800bn in the red now, and it's only going to get worse - by more than 50%!

	CBO	Total	GF
2004	412	412.0	792.0
2005	368	490.0	896.0
2006	295	448.0	897.0
2007	261	452.0	948.0
2008	235	453.0	985.0
2009	207	455.0	1026.0
2010	189	471.0	1086.0
2011	80	510.0	1172.0
2012	-71	411.0	1124.0
2013	-85	457.0	1224.0
2014	-115	467.0	1291.0
2015	-141	496.0	1381.0

"Net" is the net federal deficit, and "GF" is the general fund deficit (i.e., not counting Trust Fund surpluses, see p42 CBO 2005).

[UPDATE - Note: Net and General Fund numbers include cost of ongoing "supplemental" expenses for Iraq, Afghanistan, and other Global War on Terror (GWoT) operations, which CBO esitmated at $115 bn per year in its Sept 2004 report. The AMT numbers are from a CPBB report from 2003, and include the synergistic "interaction" effects of reforming the AMT (through inflation indexing) while not extending the other tax cuts, as well as additional debt service costs.

The spike at 2011 and sharp dip immediately thereafter is due to the expiration of the tax cuts. AMT costs decrease in 2012 because the rise in regular taxes will reduce the number of taxpayers who qualify for the AMT.]

War Funding Crisis!

Crap. We've run out of money. Bush asks for $80 bn for Iraq, Afghanistan. The Terror War is costing us more this year than it will gernerate in oil revenues, donor contributions, opium smuggling, and taxes! We've run the Iraq War Trust Fund dry - how will we ever pay for it all?

Maybe we need to create Private Personal Combat Accounts. Every soldier's family can set aside a three of four (dozen) percent of their income, and invest it tax free. The proceeds can then be used to purchase body armor, tanks, med-evacs, water, or whatever it is they need.

Otherwise, I guess the only solution is to end the war now. Gotta bring everybody home and surrender to the terrorists because there's no way we can afford $80 billion a year just to bailout those silly soldiers. If they made poor financial decisions in the past (like enlisting), well, we that's not our problem. I mean, every teenager knows that you can't trust the US Government to be there for you in 30 years, or even tomorrow. You can't run a business this way - always expecting the government to bail you out every year.*

*(Airlines, automakers, farmers, insurers, energy, and all other GOP donors excepted)