Silly libruls, austerity is for broke people:
With U.S. and coalition forces bombarding Libya leader Muammer al-Qaddafi's forces from the sea and air, the cost for the first day alone of the operation was well over $100 million with the total price tag expected to grow much higher the longer the strikes continue, analysts said.
Operation Odyssey Dawn appears to be focused on creating a limited no-fly zone mostly targeting Tripoli and other areas along the coast, which will require a wide range of military assets.
With allies expected to shoulder some of the bill, the initial stages of taking out Libya's air defenses could ultimately cost U.S.-led coalition forces between $400 million and $800 million, according to a report released by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments earlier this month.
Recently, Cato's C. Bradley Thompson wrote about neoconservatism, saying that neoconservatives "are and always have been, by contrast, defenders of the post–New Deal welfare state." Other than David Frum, I'm not aware of too many conservatives who have offered forceful defenses of the New Deal welfare state. Rather, as neoconservatism has become the dominant foreign-policy ideology of the Republican Party, there's been a hybridization of neoconservative foreign-policy aggressiveness with more traditional conservative hostility toward social insurance. As a result, America's war expenses have become an untouchable driver of deficits that provide pretext for dismantling the welfare state. I don't expect it'll be long before intervention in Libya becomes yet another argument for why we need to cut Social Security or Medicaid.
