Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars Mutilated Our Economy

By Derrick Crowe


Click here to watch the video



$1,000,000,000,000.00



As of today, that's how much we've spent just in direct costs so far on the stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.



One trillion dollars, gone. And we're just getting warmed up...there are trillions more in future direct and indirect costs coming.



These two wars mutilated our economy. There's no other way to say it. We've taken a huge amount of wealth and done things with it that damaged the economy. People are out of work and hurting today because we chose to launch two wars that aren't worth the cost.



The most glaring example of this dynamic is the use of hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to invade and occupy Iraq, which led to higher oil prices, which hit taxpayers again in their pocketbooks.



Many other examples exist: We pay to train American kids to kill in Afghanistan. We pay to ship them overseas where they die or get injured. We pay for medical care for the survivors. Their families lose both the wounded's income and often lose additional income when loved ones reduce work hours to stay home and care for the wounded.



The list of these vicious cycles goes on and on. In all cases, our government actually charges us for the privilege of having an even harder time making it in this tough economy.



Actually, it's worse than that. The government charges us for the privilege of having a tough economy in the first place.



According to the Center for Economic and Policy Research's (CEPR) Dean Baker:



"In standard economic models, defense spending is a direct drain on the economy, reducing efficiency, slowing growth and costing jobs. ...[S]tandard economic models...project that the increase in defense spending since 2000 will cost the economy close to two million jobs in the long run."



Baker's point in his article was that groups that scream about potential "job loss" from government "interference" never put that "loss" in any context. Government spending does stimulate economic activity during a downturn. The question is, how stimulative is one type of spending versus another? So let's make sure we're playing fair and put this in some perspective in terms of job creation.



It turns out that, excluding tax cuts for consumption, war spending is the least stimulative type of government spending.



An October 2007 study by the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) found that per $1 billion invested in the following fields, you create wildly different numbers of jobs:



  • Defense: 8,555 jobs

  • Construction for home weatherization/infrastructure: 12,804 jobs

  • Health care: 12,883 jobs

  • Education: 17,687 jobs

  • Mass transit: 19,795 jobs


So if you take $1 billion in taxpayer dollars and spend it on war versus on building energy efficient homes and other infrastructure, the opportunity cost for that spending is 4,249 potential jobs. Spending it on war versus mass transit costs you 11,240 potential jobs.



Now consider that $1 trillion is one thousand billion. Because we're spending so many billions--now trillions--of dollars on these two wars, we're losing hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of potential jobs.



PERI concludes that:



...[B]y addressing social needs in the areas of health care, education, education, mass transit, home weatherization and infrastructure repairs, we would also create more jobs and, depending on the specifics of how such a reallocation is pursued, both an overall higher level of compensation for working people in the U.S. and a better average quality of jobs.



These lost potential jobs aren't even the whole picture. We also lose the fruits of spending that money in more productive ways, which, according to the National Priorities Project, include:



  • 188,536,667 Students receiving Pell Grants of $5550 OR

  • 8,139,680 Affordable Housing Units OR

  • 461,193,337 Children with Health Care for One Year


But hey, at least these wars are working out well for BP, right?



Had enough? Help us get people talking about the cost of these wars by playing using our new Facebook app to show us your trillion dollar plan, and share it with your friends.



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