Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said Thursday that he will have to lay off 200,000 civilian employees and contractors, terminate military contracts and partially shut down U.S. military bases unless Congress acts quickly to approve additional funding for the Iraq war.Would this be a bad time to include in this discussion, say:
Echoing similar warnings from past funding battles, Gates said the Army and Marine Corps will develop plans for sharp spending cuts unless Congress moves to provide $196 billion President Bush has requested.
On Tuesday, Bush signed a separate $471-billion Defense appropriations bill. But that spending measure includes little of the money needed to keep the wars going in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The House has offered the president $50 billion as a bridge fund for the wars, but it would require most combat troops to leave Iraq by December 2008.
The White House has vowed to veto the bill if it passes the Senate in a vote planned for today.
...
Gates said the department was only authorized to move $3.7 billion, which would fund the wars for about a week.
[ cf Gates warns of layoffs without war funding ( emphasis mine) ]
U.S. officials have thrown a rhetorical lifeline to the downtrodden dollar by expressing faith in the economy's long-term "fundamental" prospects.For those children who are not old enough to actually remember the real live actual american history of the actual real live american involvement in the real live actual hostile fire payzone sequence in south east asia, the central concern remains:
But the effort may only brake the greenback's slide as long as financial markets expect U.S. interest rates to move lower.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson's tweaking of Washington's strong-dollar mantra to stress the U.S. economy's fundamental strength appears to be an effort to talk the dollar up, or at least ensure a decline that has taken it to a record low against a basket of major currencies does not become a rout.
"A strong dollar is very much in our nation's interest," he said on Thursday, reiterating a long-standing currency mantra ahead of a weekend meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 industrialized and emerging market economic powers.
[ cf Paulson's dollar policy tweak may only slow slide ]
An Undeclared War Is One Thing.So maybe it is time for the president to work out why it is that for the last how many ever years he has been unwilling to support, well, gosh, a National War Bond Drive to raise the monies that would be needed to defeat the Axis Of Weasle????
An Unfunded War is Another.
Could it be that the Great warPresident, and warCzar and the praetorPwhomever ( the second p is silient as in pReasonable ) are, well, still confused about how much more at war the Nation happens to be this time, than any of the other times that the president has been authorized to do as he wilst with which ever is the current crisis of the moment.
Now don't get me wrong, I can appreciate that so many of the Faux News Folks who were issuing the death threats in support of Baba O'Reilly in the Holy Crusade against Brian de Palma's new film, Redacted, are all, well, you know, got that big manly wood, that at any moment the Great War Leader will call upon them to take up their blood oaths and slaughter the unbelievers and the idolotors who would raise up the mere law of man against the divine will.... or at least get them a really cool acting option in some really great rebuttal to redacted, where they get to be the really brave and dynamic war hero is willing to go on fighting against all of them thar sand niggahs, even while the bleeding heart wimp liberals want to limit the war winning methods to those that are lawfully allowed under the UCMJ, and has all of the fun and excitement of 30 days of night, as our great war heroe's go through the process of eating out the internal organs of the unbelievers, but as they come flying home to rescue america from the apostate spawn who wish to allow mere economic fundamentals of an actual market economy over-run the ideological purity of a fully formed faith based economics....
Or could the real problem here be that in the course of the last how many ever budgetary cycles the great war leaders have been able to accept that there will be american operations in the various countries overseas, and that a bit of long term fiscal planning might stimulate some work on a basic suite of plausbile military like projects for addressing the core politico-military issues in said over seas lands. That such a fiscally sound approach to the process would lead to the fundamentally simplistic notion that the cost of doing thatThingiePooh would become a part of the 'defense department' budgetary system... You know, so that the current Clintonesta in the White House were not acting like the last Clintonesta and having to do these nation building projects as separate funding initiatives...
Or is that all a part of the problem here....
The faith based war like stuff, is, well, as unScientific as the rest of the faith based economic models, and the faith based information acquisition processes.
Oopsie.
Guess it so has to suck to be a pro-war weenie with no actual prior military service, and even worse, what with almost everyone understanding all of the great job opportunities open to 4-F's as parts of the various super duper extra special privatized corporate luxuries in this time of transferring the tax liabilities unto the unborn baby jesus....
Who knows, maybe next time...
Yeah, next time there is a real need to be more at war than ever before, all of the great war heroes will get up from sitting on their faces and stop taking the beer in the rear, and, golly gee, become their very own Gomer Pyle Immitations of their worst ideological manifestations!!!
Who knows, maybe things will get more reasonable...
Or we can have the fun of the war of fiscal faith basing...