There's been much debate about the cost of the various healthcare reforms being considered and the effect they may have on the national debt. The latest "scoring" by the Government Budget Office that I've seen of the latest round of proposals would cost about $600 billion over a ten year period.

Just a thought on what other government expenditures might be cut in order to pay for this critically important domestic social program...what about the costs of continuing the wars in Iraq and now back in Afghanistan again?

We've had major deployments of our younger generation to that region of the world for almost a decade. More than 4,000 have been killed and almost 50,000 badly injured. Those sacrifices seem to have had little effect. Now that we're winding down our troop levels in Iraq, the level of secular violence is ramping up. Even though everyone has said that the solution there needs to be a political one, not military, the Iraqi leaders seem no closer to becoming a real government than they were five years ago. We left Afghanistan about five years ago with a newly elected "government" even though everyone knew that about all that government controlled was the capital city and the surrounding area. The traditional warlords and the Taliban continued to control about 2/3 of the country. Now the Taliban is trying to further expand the territory they control, getting close to the capital city itself. And we've now found that the elected President Karzai presides over a largely corrupt government. Today's news reports say that our "generals on the ground" will be asking for increases in the troops strength deployed to Afghanistan from the current 45,000 up to possibly as many as 100,000, about 2/3 of the peak troop levels we ever had in Iraq, even during the initial invasion. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs says that the situation in Afghanistan is "critical and worsening".

Rough estimates of the costs of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan amount to $600 billion a year or thereabouts--significantly more than it would cost to fund all the healthcare reforms, stimulus expenditures, auto bailouts and other more traditional domestic programs over the next decade.

What ought the U.S. be doing in this regard? Can we continue to afford to build and re-build countries in the Middle East and at the same time care for our own citizens and economy here at home? The economics of deficit spending and the accumulating national debt seems to say NO.

What do you think?