Stop Wasting Money

We're in the homestretch of the Stop Wasting Money campaign. I'd like to recap the issues that are the center of this campaign, with links back to those posts.

Obviously the theme is Stop Wasting Money. The first area within this theme, and the biggest waste of money, is how much we waste overseas.

This is about the $200 billion we spend defending rich countries. We've been defending Europe, Japan and South Korea for 60, 60, and 50 years. They are wealthy countries and are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves. We should focus on defending our borders, and spending a lot less money doing so since that's such an easy thing to do.

During the campaign, North Korea tested an atomic bomb. That prompted another post about how we waste money defending rich countries from lesser countries. North Korea is a great example, surrounded by China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, the smallest of the four with a high-tech economy 40 times the size of its northern neighbor. I also discuss this in the post on South Korean Pork.

The general issue is a great contrast between myself and my opponent. You can see us debating this and the other issues in Redlich - McNulty 1 and Redlich - McNulty 2. He insists on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, but refuses to set any timetable for Europe, Japan and South Korea. I say we get out of all of them as soon as possible. My opponent is really in the Washington mindset, and my disagreement isn't just with him, but with all of Washington.

Pork barrel spending is a great example of wasted money. There are posts on farm subsidy pork, the reasons for pork, the magnitude of pork, Homeland Security waste, Congress' sneaky earmark process, and how my opponent Mike McNulty supports pork consistently.

I also talked about how we waste money on the War on Drugs, in the way we approach drunk driving, and immigration.

I've discussed several other issues in the campaign, but the wasting money theme is the big one and the above posts cover it. You can also see comments on a variety of other topics by searching this blog (see the very top of the blog) or by looking at the list of topics on the right side.

One last issue, to be clear about the contrast between myself and my opponent: He voted for the war in Iraq. He continued to support it for a long time. Recently he's said it was a mistake and that we should get out soon. But he's never apologized for his vote, and he voted just a few weeks ago to continue funding the war he supposedly wants us to withdraw from.

I opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. We should have finished Afghanistan before getting involved anywhere else. The Iraq distraction sucked the wind out of our effort in Afghanistan, and has greatly damaged our prospects there. Iraq was never a serious threat to the US. Several other countries were bigger threats both in WMD and in supporting terrorism. Pakistan was and is near the top of both lists, yet we call them an ally.

As a side note, McNulty referred to Pakistan as a stable government in one of our debates and defended that statement. This kind of misperception is quite dangerous, but is commonplace in Washington. Pakistan is a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism and there have been at least two assassination attempts on Pervez Musharraf. He is holding it together for now, but who knows how long he'll hold out. Meanwhile many suspect his government has aided Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The discussion started with his reference to North Korea's supposedly unstable government. While I agree that country is in a tough situation, its government has been stable for many decades and as far as I know there are no threats to its stability.