[Mb-civic] Who's Paying for Our Patriotism? - Uwe Reinhardt -Washington Post

[richard haase]

AND WHY CANT SOME OF THAT PATRIOTISM MONEY BE DIVERTED INTO NEW MUSICALS????
THATS WHAT ID LIKE TO KNOW
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: William Swiggard 
  To: mb-civic 
  Sent: Monday, August 01, 2005 9:29 AM
  Subject: [Mb-civic] Who's Paying for Our Patriotism? - Uwe Reinhardt -Washington Post


  Who's Paying for Our Patriotism?


  By Uwe E. Reinhardt
  Monday, August 1, 2005; Page A17

  President Bush assures us that the ongoing twin wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are worth the sacrifices they entail. Editorialists around the nation agree and say that a steadfast American public was willing to stay the course.

  Should anyone be surprised by this national resolve, given that these wars visit no sacrifice of any sort -- neither blood nor angst nor taxes -- on well over 95 percent of the American people?

  At most, 500,000 American troops are at risk of being deployed to these war theaters at some time. Assume that for each of them some 20 members of the wider family sweat with fear when they hear that a helicopter crashed in Afghanistan or that X number of soldiers or Marines were killed or seriously wounded in Iraq. It implies that no more than 10 million Americans have any real emotional connection to these wars.

  <>The administration and Congress have gone to extraordinary lengths to insulate voters from the money cost of the wars -- to the point even of excluding outlays for them from the regular budget process. Furthermore, they have financed the wars not with taxes but by borrowing abroad.

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/31/AR2005073101080.html?nav=hcmodule 


------------------------------------------------------------------------------


  _______________________________________________
  Mb-civic mailing list
  Mb-civic at islandlists.com
  http://www.islandlists.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mb-civic
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050801/266a0d01/attachment.htm