Korea, Vietnam, Iraq 1.0, Serbia, Iraq 2.0, Lybia, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine… I’d like to know exactly what you don’t see as disasters in any of these.

I don’t know how this can be a serious argument in any way whatsoever. Just the fact that the word trillions is being thrown around like that’s not the fundamental issue… These numbers have become meaningless, and if anything, demonstrate how close to bankruptcy we have approached. To illustrate, a low-skilled single-income family pre-WWII could afford property and support the family. Now, an average-skilled dual-income family will likely not be able to afford property and will be barely making ends meet.

This is directly a cause of inflationary banking practices that is the hollowing out that I mentioned previously, promoting spending instead of saving, requiring investing to try (and generally fail) to keep up with inflation. It is why we’re constantly arguing over minimum wage and Social Security. If the dollar was anything remotely what it was 100 or even 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be seeing these problems to the degree that we do.

To tie this back to our discussion, a major reason for this inflationary spending is to support our military engagements internationally.

I don’t buy the argument of peace through war. There is merit to having a strong national defense. T.Roosevelt’s motto of “talk softly and carry a big stick” comes to mind. But I don’t believe that playing both sides of Sunni and Shiite conflicts in the Middle East or playing war games with Communist countries makes European countries safe. It creates blowback, refugee crises, and escalates conflicts down the road.

I can agree with that. I call this the “worst of both worlds” scenario.

Indeed we will have to wait and see.

I won’t disagree with you, though I think we would probably not see eye to eye on what constitutes a Neocon, which by my perspective would include the majority of the Democratic Party.