We Will Go Broke Fighting in Iraq

Something that isn't being considered in the whole Iraq debate: how do we pay for the war? Or for that matter, how about Afghanistan? Right now it's being paid for by China. But for how much longer?

The economy cannot sustain the kind of debt that is being created by the those wars. Richard Reeves got it right:

[...]Americans who consider themselves middle-class may be on hard or harder times two years from now. We are living in a house of cards.

Indeed, credit cards, hundreds of millions of them, are part of the reason for the troubles next time. But easy, expensive credit isn't the only danger for "ordinary" Americans. A falling real estate market is a sword over the heads of Americans who have maintained their lifestyle by borrowing against the rising value of their homes. And, most important, whether buying with cash or plastic, ordinary Americans are simply making less money for more work.

The economy is growing but benefiting only the rich:

In the past, as national productivity rose -- which it did by more than 16 percent in the past five years -- the paychecks of Americans used to rise because of their own sweat and ingenuity. Not true this time. Median income during the same period has decreased by 2.9 percent.

If we don't pay now we will pay later - in spades:

We may all be whistling past the cemetery -- or the mall. The average amount spent by shoppers, 140 million of them, in the weekend after Thanksgiving increased from $302 last year to $360 this year. Most of that, I'd bet, was plastic money, borrowed at interest rates from 10 percent to above 20 percent. The federal debt and the cost of the war in Iraq are being passed along to our grandchildren, but our personal bills will come due before the 2008 election. Then comes the debate about whom to blame for such things. Businessmen? The rich? Republicans? Democrats? Ourselves?