THE ONLY WEDDING I’LL BE WATCHING TODAY …

… will be this one.

Unless the Royal Wedding™ has leather fetish gear, motorcycles crashing through stained glass windows and Billy Idol performing his first two solo albums. Then I’m happy to watch that one.

Start again,

This is dF

A WAR YOU CAN AFFORD

[A bit old, but I’m catching up on my bloggery …]

ITEM: Senator Al Franken introduces a resolution that would require Congress to make sure that any war it signs off on is funded beforehand.

The idea is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan made the US debt and deficit worse, and that if we’re going to go around doing that kind of thing – and, you know, be fiscally responsible and crap – we need to make sure in advance we can afford them within the current budget, whether that means cutting spending elsewhere, raising taxes, or both, and we need to make that clear in advance so that people who support the war have a better idea of what it’s going to cost them (apart, from all the dead soldiers and civilians and stuff).

From Franken’s press release:

“[M]y resolution … will ensure that Congress and American citizens must face the financial sacrifice of going to war. And it will force us to decide whether a war is worth that sacrifice.”

That sounds great on paper, but in real life would probably do little to stop frivolous wars and instead create badly underfunded ones – or inspire new advances in innovative accounting.

Or, better yet, Congress will go ahead and tax the hell out the people to pay for it. And of course there’s the age-old argument that you can’t budget for wars because you ultimately don’t know how much money you’ll need until it’s done (the two current wars being a great example).

Which is why I suspect the resolution is in reality intended more as a political dig on Republicans who blather about fiscal responsibility but refuse to take fiscal responsibility for wars that they supported that turned out to be endless quagmires and bottomless money pits and whose budgets don’t even appear on the books.

But I like that someone is making the point, and it ties in nicely with my thoughts on the draft. It’s laughably easy to cheer for war when it’s not in yr backyard and it’s not yr ass and/or money on the line. You’d probably see a lot less public support for war if supporters were expected to either go and help fight or take a bigger hit on their tax returns.

What the hell we fightin’ for,

This is dF