How to spend the peace dividend?

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An article in the NY Times talks about the end of the surge in Afghanistan and asks the question in the title.

Now exactly how does that "war dividend" thing work?
I think it goes like this.

We go to war.
We raise taxes to pay for the war.
The war is over.
The taxes are NOT cancelled.
We have revenue to spend.
A dividend.

That image is the haze of obfuscation that surrounds the Times article.

It is true that the war taxes will not be cancelled.
But that is because there were no war taxes in the first place.
We borrowed the billions to pay for the surge.
There is no dividend just an illusion, an excuse to borrow and spend more.

This is the mind set that got us into the fiscal trouble that we are in.

Watch out for the other side of this tragi-comedy of irresponsibility, though. They may just agree that there is a dividend and we need to cut taxes to absorb it!
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