Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
USA Today
August 13, 2008
Pg. 10
If the U.S. government's budget were in the same shape as Iraq's, American taxpayers would be wondering what to do with a budget surplus of about $1.4 trillion.
Wouldn't that be nice.
Instead, thanks in part to the $10 billion it spends every month in Iraq, the U.S. government is projecting a deficit of almost $400 billion this year. Meanwhile, Iraq is in budget heaven, awash with oil money. Until it passed a new spending plan last week, Iraq's government was on track to run up a surplus of as much as $50 billion this year, or roughly half its revenue, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The GAO report details how a nation that desperately needs electricity, water, housing and other infrastructure is sitting on money it won't or can't spend. Meanwhile, U.S. taxpayers have funded the vast majority of Iraq's reconstruction. This can't continue.
With its infrastructure in tatters and Iraqis in desperate need of basics such as electricity, why isn't the Iraqi government spending much more of its oil wealth to rebuild the country? Iraqi and U.S. officials say that the Iraqis don't have the financial expertise yet to spend their money, that anti-corruption procedures make the process cumbersome, that the war made rebuilding perilous, etc. Perhaps. But these are weak excuses in view of how much the lack of progress in Iraqis' daily lives undercuts the U.S. effort there.
Although Bush administration officials promise that the U.S. is handing over reconstruction to the Iraqis, inconvenient evidence to the contrary seems to keep popping up. For example, Congress recently appropriated $5.3 billion for reconstruction this year and next. And the U.S. is spending $33 million on development projects at the Baghdad airport, including work on a three-star hotel the Iraqis will own, according to Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John Warner, R-Va.
Levin, Warner and other members of Congress should keep the heat on the administration to justify every new penny in U.S. spending. They can also press the Iraqis to use some of their oil money to ease the U.S. burden — by taking over payments to the thousands of former Sunni insurgents now siding with the U.S., for example, or lowering American forces' fuel bills, or maybe even reimbursing the United States for money Americans spend on rebuilding from here on.
If the question is who's better able to afford it, the answer seems pretty plain.
August 13, 2008
Pg. 10
If the U.S. government's budget were in the same shape as Iraq's, American taxpayers would be wondering what to do with a budget surplus of about $1.4 trillion.
Wouldn't that be nice.
Instead, thanks in part to the $10 billion it spends every month in Iraq, the U.S. government is projecting a deficit of almost $400 billion this year. Meanwhile, Iraq is in budget heaven, awash with oil money. Until it passed a new spending plan last week, Iraq's government was on track to run up a surplus of as much as $50 billion this year, or roughly half its revenue, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The GAO report details how a nation that desperately needs electricity, water, housing and other infrastructure is sitting on money it won't or can't spend. Meanwhile, U.S. taxpayers have funded the vast majority of Iraq's reconstruction. This can't continue.
With its infrastructure in tatters and Iraqis in desperate need of basics such as electricity, why isn't the Iraqi government spending much more of its oil wealth to rebuild the country? Iraqi and U.S. officials say that the Iraqis don't have the financial expertise yet to spend their money, that anti-corruption procedures make the process cumbersome, that the war made rebuilding perilous, etc. Perhaps. But these are weak excuses in view of how much the lack of progress in Iraqis' daily lives undercuts the U.S. effort there.
Although Bush administration officials promise that the U.S. is handing over reconstruction to the Iraqis, inconvenient evidence to the contrary seems to keep popping up. For example, Congress recently appropriated $5.3 billion for reconstruction this year and next. And the U.S. is spending $33 million on development projects at the Baghdad airport, including work on a three-star hotel the Iraqis will own, according to Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John Warner, R-Va.
Levin, Warner and other members of Congress should keep the heat on the administration to justify every new penny in U.S. spending. They can also press the Iraqis to use some of their oil money to ease the U.S. burden — by taking over payments to the thousands of former Sunni insurgents now siding with the U.S., for example, or lowering American forces' fuel bills, or maybe even reimbursing the United States for money Americans spend on rebuilding from here on.
If the question is who's better able to afford it, the answer seems pretty plain.