The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Editorials

December 4, 2009

Message to Huffington: Zero deficit war means no war

The Back Porch

By Nerissa Young

Arianna Huffington is like a prissy, yappy dog that attaches itself to a britches leg and won’t let go.

On “Larry King Live” this week, she got smacked with the doofus stick and actually said, “If we want health care deficit neutral, why isn’t the war deficit neutral as well?”

A deficit neutral war? Whatever planet she is living on certainly isn’t this one.

Many Americans would like to enjoy deficit neutral lives, but the reality is that living costs money.

In this country, dying does, too, but that’s another discussion for another time.

The other panelists were former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura and TV personality and economist Ben Stein. They were arguing about whether Americans should pay a war tax.

King stopped their arguing to let Huffington have a say.

Daisy the family dog would have made more sense barking than Huffington’s comment about a deficit neutral war.

War is hell and costs a hellish amount of money. Wars have always been expensive in dollars and human lives.

Paying for the war might be easier if Congress stopped passing bailouts and pork bills that skyrocketed America’s debt to the highest amount in history.

If Americans are going to be asked to fight a war, they should expect the best equipment to protect themselves and their comrades. The nation owes them that.

Instead, they are using makeshift equipment like the Marines who were issued obsolete Army rifles and sent into the jungles of Vietnam during that war.

Stein argued a war tax would plunge the country deeper into a recession. That’s probably true, but Depression-era America fought a world war. Some people swear Franklin Roosevelt urged a war declaration to snap the country out of the Depression.

A big difference between now and then is Americans’ commitment to something they can’t put in their pockets as tangible proof of getting their money’s worth. No one wants to sacrifice long enough to sit in the drive-thru at a fast-food joint for 10 minutes when another one can serve a meal in 5 minutes.

A second difference is fewer people are convinced America stands to benefit by staying in this war.

Some commitment stirred into a big pot of patriotism could allow Uncle Sam to feed Americans a heaping exhortation to buy war bonds. Selling war bonds helped finance the Civil War, World War I and World War II.

During World War II, Americans were sending their sons overseas, rationing most goods needed for daily living and spending their loose change to do the right thing by buying bonds to support the war.

If they weren’t overseas personally fighting Hitler and Mussolini, they were doing their part to support those who were.

That was a time when the nation was the United States of America, not the partisan divided states of America it is now.

A deficit neutral war? Not likely anytime soon. That will happen about the same time humans come up with a death neutral war.

Until then, Huffington and her ilk should huff and puff somewhere else, preferably in a cave where only bats would be subjected to their idiocy.

— Young is a Register-Herald columnist. E-mail: ynerissa@verizon.net.

© 2009 by Nerissa Young

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