And Tea Party-goers have been largely silent about spending for the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
To begin, even though the various Tea Party groups pay lip service to "Constitutionally limited government" and copies of the Constitution are often handed out at Tea Party rallies, they seem to have forgotten (or never read) Article 1, Section 8 that gives Congress the power to declare war. Otherwise, they would at least bother to point out that both Afghanistan and Iraq are unconstitutional (as has been every U.S. military intervention overseas since World War 2).
Constitutionality aside, the cost of military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan is hardly trivial. The National Priorities Project’s Cost of War counter is currently (as this is written) at $987 billion-plus for both wars (remember when former White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey opined that the Iraq conflict would cost $100 billion to $200 billion and then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld later called his estimate "baloney"?) According to the National Priorities Project, "to date [fiscal year 2010] $1.05 trillion dollars have been allocated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In their book The Three Trillion Dollar War, Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz estimate that the total cost of both wars will be $3 trillion.
You would think these kind of numbers would grab the Tea Party’s attention. If the prospect of $940 billion over ten years for health care concerns them, the $680 billion in FY 2010 for the Department of Defense (the FY2011 request is $708 billion) would also seem to warrant some concern on their part.
Apparently not. So it’s hard to take the Tea Party’s mantra of "fiscal responsibility" seriously. Although the Tea Party has its roots in Ron Paul’s revolution, they forgot the part about a non-interventionist foreign policy (full disclosure: I was a foreign policy advisor to Dr. Paul during his 2008 presidential run), which is part and parcel of a constitutionally limited government and fiscal responsibility.
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