It's clear that most of the blame is to G. W. Bush. But neglecting to mention that Obama is fighting two wars seriously irks me.
For the same reason that Reagan's tax cuts aren't mentioned under every subsequent administration. When you chart a timeline of policy changes, it's implied that the responsibility for continuing those policies is inherited by each subsequent administration until a reversal (if any).
He does have a magic wand, in the form of a pen that he can use to veto new military spending. He hasn't used it.
> If the large banks, oil companies and corporations thought it would be in their interest to end the wars, the troops would be home.
No. If Obama chose not to renew the various war spending bills, the troops would be home.
> Plus what are you going to do with the sections of economy that depend on these wars?
This sentence is confusing to me. The wars cost us money, money that we don't have any more and that is causing us huge amounts of trouble right now. I'm not sure what will happen to those sections. But they didn't exist 10 years ago, they exist now for the sole purpose of killing people, and they are using money that isn't theirs. Surely we can do away with them.
Xradionut is using the broken window principle - if we break stuff and then rebuild it, we've increased GDP and therefore helped everyone. If we stop doing this, we might ruin the economy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
In other news, the Tsunami was great news for Japan.
No. I'm a life long student of history and politics that was raised by a pair of history professors. I grew up watching news about the Vietnam War and the Nixon debacle. (Yes, I'm an old cynical fart.) Most people evaluate political news with the attention span of a day-trader or ferret instead of spending the time researching the causes and tracing the money.
Obama can't fulfill his promises nor do the morally and legally right actions to "fix" the situation. His hands are tied by his political obligations. That's why the general public is going to be fked some more. We've basically turned back a generation of progress in a generation.
There's no such thing as a line-item veto. So, it's not that simple. But he's commander in chief and could just order the troops home, which I think he should do by early next year and make the Republicans howl about it in between howling about spending. Not that cognitive dissonance has stopped them so far.
> Surely we can do away with them.
What are you going to do with the military and their families? To the contractors and suppliers? And the jobs and businesses that relies on the war gravy train? You need a "real" stimulus and infrastructure program. Otherwise you are looking at an much larger number of unemployed group of people, many which are soldiers.
We have some real big problems in the United States, which will not be solved, because it's not interests of the people in control to solve them.
Not to change the debate, but if Obama really cared about saving money he not only would have ended the wars in 2009 but also cut military spending significantly - we could keep the largest military in the world and still cut its spending by $3 or $4 hundred billion. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e...)