Guns Or Butter

Yggy makes a hell of a catch here on the issue of government projects.

Here’s a great Steven Walt post reacting to Louis Uchitelle’s point about the dearth of infrastructure mega-projects in the United States:

But it’s not as though the United States hasn’t started some big public works projects over the past decade or so; it just hasn’t been doing them here at home. We’ve spent billions constructing military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, and another billion or more on a giant embassy in Baghdad and another one in Pakistan. Needless to say, those “public works” projects are a drain on the U.S. economy rather than a source of additional productivity.

As I’ve said before, Americans have come to believe that spending government revenues on U.S. citizens here at home is usually a bad thing and should be viewed wth suspicion, but spending billions on vast social engineering projects overseas is the hallmark of patriotism and should never be questioned. This position makes no sense, but it is hard to think of a prominent U.S. leader who is making an explicit case for doing somewhat less abroad so that we can afford to build a better future here at home. Debates about foreign policy, grand strategy, and military engagement — including the current debate over Obama’s decision to add another 30,000-plus troops in Afghanistan — tend to occur in isolation from a discussion of other priorities, as if there were no tradeoffs between what we do for others and what we are able to do for Americans here at home.

Strikingly, I find that this myopia even extends to a refusal to discuss tradeoffs within the domain of interacting with foreigners. Say that building a well could help some people in Mozambique, and you get nowhere. Say that sending a Provincial Reconstruction Team to build a a well could help some people in Afghanistan, and the well gets built. Nevermind that you could undertake a dozen “help poor foreigners out with problems in their lives” projects in a friendly country for the cost of doing one in a country where guerilla fighters lead to security problems. Once a situation is defined as a “war” in which the objective is to “win” all kinds of considerations go out the window.

And that's been the truth for the last eight years.  Ask a conservative if we should spend money on a bridge, hospital or school in the United States and it's "a waste of money on a broken system."  Ask the same conservative if we should build them in Afghanistan or Iraq, and it's "a vital step in securing the peace."

I'm beginning to think the hallmark of a Wingnut is "any person who believes rebuilding Kabul is more important to America than rebuilding New Orleans."  They're the same people who say that America simply cannot afford health care reform, but we have a duty have to send tens of thousands of more troops to the Middle East.  Building infrastructure here is socialism.  Building infrastructure there is patriotism.

What's wrong with us?