@MamradpivoWe have Senator McCain’s voting record in Congress to tell us where he would have come down on many issues. He excoriated Obama for not forciong the Iraqis to let us stay in their supposedly soverign country. So under McCain, we would have stayed in Iraq until some unspecified objective like the death of terrorism as a tactic occurred. Given that we know armies are notoriously poor at fighting ideas, ti might have taken a few more millenia to defeat terrorism, or we could have opted for the quick path of making the world unfit for human life.
McCain sang this on the campaign trail, so I can guess we would have long since invaded Iran. Syria is on his list too. And he was for a heavy military footprint in Lybia or letting Qaddafi just use genocide to maintain power. So there probably would never have been any Arab Spring.
As to the economy, I’ll address my thoughts on this to those who specifically picked that issue below.
@Simone_De_Beauvoir My, you’re accumulating a lot of GS marks for a simple, one-word reply. GA!
@jerv War is indeed good or the economy because it involves massive government spending. The Republicans love the Big Lie that government spending is ALWAYS bad for the economy even though they never met a war they didn’t like. They claim that FDR’s WPA did not help the economy because government spending NEVER helps the economy, even though the US GDP had fully recovered before WWII began. Then they add the contradictory claim that WWII is what ended the Depression. WWII was government spending on a scale never before seen in the US.
But war spending is terrible for the deficit. Another Republican Big Lie is that they are the party of fiscal responsibility and hate the deficit. Yet George W. Bush could have used a inexpensive lightning raid to get the Taliban and Bin Laden instead of the longest and now second most costly war in US history, still ongoing. And Iraq was a $1 trillion war of choice that would likely have resolved itself as cheaply as Lybia did had we simply waited for the Arab Spring. And unlike every other President in US History, Bush financed his tow wars not by raising taxes but by cutting them twice. Add on a massive giveaway to the insurance lobby in the Prescription Drug Benefit; and you see how Bush doubled the national debt. The debt in today’;s dollars was $1 trillion and dropping when Reagan began his trickle down plan and slashed taxes for the rich. He tripled it to 3 trillion.. In fact, over 9.6 trillion was added to the national debt by Republicans between 1980 and 2008.
Obama inherited the worst financial crisis in US history from the Republicans. The GDP didn’t drop as far as it did in the Great Depression that Republican Hoover presided over beginning, but we were in almost no debt when FDR inherited the reigns, so he had a much better toolbox available to repair the deregulation and casino capitalism damage left in 1929. Including the FY 2009 budget Obama inherited from Bush, the National Debt was already at 11.6 trillion when he took office. And fixing that sort of train wreck of the economy is expensive. Plus the dead economy drops revenue so debt piles up rapidly.