Naked Capitalism Link of the Day

Today's link: War, Debt and Democracy, at Aljazeera.  From the post:

Moreover, the US is paying for these wars with debt. The government funded World War II partly with war bonds, but it also instituted the first general income tax in American history, increasing tax revenue from $8.7bn in 1941 to $45bn in 1945. This would have been impossible for an unpopular war. To finance today’s wars, by contrast, the US government has not only avoided raising taxes, but has actually cut them on an enormous scale, with the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 now extended at least through 2012.
By 2009, the US budget deficit had climbed to more than 10 per cent of GDP, thanks to increased expenditures and plummeting tax revenues during the recession. Overall public debt, to which each year’s deficit adds another hefty dollop, is projected to exceed 100 per cent of GDP in 2011, up from around 40 per cent in the late 1970’s.
Countercyclical spending and tax policy are widely acceptable to experts and taxpayers alike, but deficit spending on wars is known to be a paltry way to stimulate the economy. It does, however, buy political time for US administrations to continue prosecuting ill-considered and expensive wars with little domestic scrutiny. With the US government’s access to global debt markets reducing the need to raise taxes, foreign governments now own nearly one-third of the US government’s $14 trillion debt.

George Bush's legacy: tax cuts for the weathy and 2 worthless wars.