Regardless of whether letting a brutal dictator, who was actively shooting at US Air Force planes (there to prevent a genocide), paying money for suicide bombers, violating UN resolutions, preventing UN inspectors form doing their job, and has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the past, get away scot-free is a good idea or not (and it’s okay which ever way you think here because any war has a cost)…

The war in Iraq is not the reason we’re not spending money on your precious program or cause!

In the decade from 1998 to 2008, annual Federal spending went from 2.1 to 2.8 trillion dollars, in 2008 inflation adjusted dollars. This means an average increase of 0.07 trillion or $70 billion per year over and above inflation. See federal spending chart here.

The total cost of the war in Iraq from March 2001 through August 2009, roughly an 8.5 year span, is $674 billion, or a yearly average of $79 billion. Source: costofwar.com.

This means that every year in the past decade we spent the equivalent of a little less than another Iraq war’s annual budget more than the previous. Quitting Iraq the next day would get us right back where we started in a year and change.

That was the situation until this year. For 2009, Federal spending is due to increase from 2.9 trillion dollars in 2008 to 3.9 trillion! That’s an in crease of one trillion, and is the equivalent of 1.5 times the expenditure on the ENTIRE war in Iraq since 2001, or the equivalent of 12.7 times the average annual spending on the war.

So quit b****ing about the war in Iraq taking away money from *YOUR FAVORITE SOCIAL SPENDING ITEM*. It’s not exactly preventing the government from spending more money, and not spending on the war is not going to balance any Federal budgets any time soon either