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Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch
I think its a bit of both. If your spending a million dollars more then your making on your yearly deficit and the next year you manage to spend a million dollars less then in theory you should balance to a 0 deficit position.
However even I'm not foolish enough to believe that you instantly turn off the money taps of a war. Canada is going to continue to spend dollars on the Afghan war in terms of bringing equipment home, repairing, refitting and replacing worn out equipment. Dealing with veterans who are leaving the military and training their replacements and replenishing supplies and ordinance.
The hookers and blow example for me is that in a lot of ways war is like spending money on useless things in that you don't see any economic benefits to it that will cover the losses.
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IIRC, the number for savings from the ending of the wars is over the next 10 years, so it's not arrived at by assuming the tap gets turned off.
I'll leave it to accountants who have actually looked at current budgeting for what the wars cost and how Reid arrived at his number to determine whether its accurate. But, in the end, there will be savings from some real reduction in actual spending, which is a far cry from choosing not to spend more on another war.
The only way the criticism of Reid's proposal would be completely accurate would be if the projected deficit already accounted for the wars ending, but you wouldn't need the Pakistan war analogy to make that point.