[Slingin Sammy 33]

Originally Posted by Beemnseven

That was one of the very few things Bush did that I liked. Unfortunately, it went nowhere. That's because Matty unfortunately is right -- we are going to get more government and apparently the people want it. If we really wanted less gov't then the people would have loudly supported Bush's attempt to privatize a portion of SS.

One more large item in your list of spending cuts -- how about we stop forking over $10 billion a month for Iraq?

IMO we should've taken a more Reagan-esque approach, subvert Saddam with special ops and fund rebels/Kurds, but we had to do something. Saddam was intent on rebuilding his nuclear program and US forces found enough Sarin there to kill over 500K people. Not to mention him thumbing his nose at numerous UN Resolutions. Although the Bush Admin was certainly the catalyst here, there was heavy bi-partisan support for going into Iraq. The Bush Admin certainly did not act unilaterally internally or externally in Iraq. Another modification I would've made would be Iraq funding more of its own reconstruction rather than us footing the bill.

Hindsight is 20/20 though, and we are where we are. We MUST finish the job and stabilize Iraq or we'll be looking at a far worse situation 10-15 years from now if we walk away with the job 60-70% done.