by James Parks, Mar 19, 2008
Here’s more evidence that President Bush and Republican presidential nominee John McCain are out of step with the American public. On the fifth anniversary of the war, a new poll shows more than seven of 10 Americans believe the war in Iraq is partially to blame for the nation’s economic woes. Yet McCain continues to support the war, which has cost almost $1 trillion and nearly 4,000 American lives.
The latest CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll shows 71 percent of respondents said they think U.S. spending in Iraq is a reason for the nation’s poor economy. Only 28 percent said they didn’t think so.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says:
Rebuilding our economy requires that we stop squandering trillions of dollars in Iraq and instead invest at home in solving the urgent problems we face as a nation.
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama tie the nation’s economic troubles to the war, saying the 1 trillion in taxpayer dollars spent on the war could be better spent providing health care for all the 47 million uninsured Americans and quality education, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure and solving the credit crisis.
In a Washington Post editorial column earlier this month, Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes, co-authors of The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, said the combination of the war’s cost and a Bush-backed tax cut led to deficit borrowing. They predicted the economic fallout of that spending would result in the nation’s largest economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Others will have to work out the geopolitics, but the economics here are clear. Ending the war, or at least moving rapidly to wind it down, would yield major economic dividends.
McCain not only supports the war, he voted last week to extend the same Bush tax cuts for the wealthy that Stiglitz and Bilmes say helped push us into this economic free fall.
The AFL-CIO Executive Council earlier this year approved a statement saying that with the war in Iraq turning into a civil war, it’s time for the United States to end its military involvement there.
More articles at http://blog.aflcio.org/