All the dailies are reporting today that the Bush White House is preparing a new budget request to help pay for the ongoing war in Iraq. The amount is expected to be between $60 billion and $70 billion.
I realize that there’s plenty of opposition in America to spending another dime in Iraq and some would just assume we packed up our things and brought our troops home. I’m not one of those people. I tend to take more of a “we broke it, we bought it” philosophy.
I’m not glad we’re there, and I didn’t want us to go in the first place, but now that we are there, we’ve got to make sure Iraq doesn’t fall apart. If it costs $60 billion to see this thing through, so be it.
One thing that I wanted to note, however, is that every penny the Bush administration asks for regarding Iraq will be more than the White House budgeted for Iraq in the first place. In other words, this is $60-$70 billion of new spending. It will not be offset by fewer tax cuts for the wealthy nor spending cuts elsewhere.
Naturally, this means the biggest deficit in the history of the world is about to get at least $60-$70 billion bigger.