Some say Reagan won the Cold War...

[Fake Boris]

We didn't have a debate before. You said something stupid (or, less likely, disingenuous) and I was mocking you.

You claimed military spendings are fixed.

They're not. You're cute.

I don't care about the rest.

[Tupac Shakur]

You claimed military spendings are fixed.

They're not.

Neither is entitlement spending, you ****. What do you think I was mocking?

[MikeH]

...by goading the USSR into a bankrupting militarism.



If one accepts this premise, must one also acknowledge that Osama bin Laden has won the War on Terror?

10/10

[OneFootInTheGrave]

Actually I think that an argument could be made that Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin won the cold war for us. In 1985 when he assumed control of the Communist party the USSR had no net debt. Within a few years it's debt rose to $200 billion. The Soviet Union's debt wasn't due to the arms race, Gorbachev's approach to Reagans arms programs was to negotiate arms reductions, not to attempt to match America's military expansion. The main problem was that Perestroika was so poorly managed. The Soviet Union had balanced its budget on the profits of state monopolies. Gorbachev divested those monopolies without procuring sufficient alternate funds. Despite that I don't think that debt was the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The economy of the Soviet Union doubled in the late 1980's, even accounting for inflation. A national debt of $ 200 billion wasn't that much compared to a GNP of $ 2 trillion. The policy of Glasnost allowed the expression of nationalist sentiment in the republics that had long been suppressed. From 1989 to 1991 incidents of civil unrest in the republics increased in intensity and in frequency. Even Russian nationalists began clamoring for the dissolution of the union, amongst those was Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin became president of Russia in July 1991, the hardliners attempted a coup in August. Yeltsin rallied his people and defeated the hardliners, within a month the Soviet Union had dissolved. The essential causative forces behind the dissolution of the Soviet state wasn't debt caused by military expenditures, it was the release of long pent-up repressed ideas.

OTOH maybe blame chould not be placed on those who released the repressed ideas, but instead on those who repressed them in the first place. from that perspective we could place some of the blame on the Romanovs, who oversaw the conquest of central asia, the caucasus, and the baltic states. You could blame it on Lenin's stroke. After trying hard-core communism Lenin realised that the Soviet Union wasn't making the economic progress he had hoped for and he relaxed party control of Soviet life. He died and Stalin took over. We all know what Stalin's approach to government was like. The next point at which something might have been done to avoid the inevitable was in 1964. Nikita Kruschev had done much to liberalize Soviet society but a bad harvest gave his opponents the leverage to remove him.
In the final analysis maybe the blame should be placed on Brezhnev and Kosygin, whose leadership inflicted a 18 year period of stagnation on the Soviet Union.
We can also ask whether the union was salvageable under any conditions. There would have been only 2 ways of saving it: (1) Utterly suppressing the nationalism of the republics out of memory. (2) Giving the citizens of the republics more reason to pledge their loyalty to the union than to their nationality.

Poly syndrome... someone takes the time to write an informative post, that gets ignored by spammers down the line...

anyhow for this one...

[OneFootInTheGrave]

I still love this piece of pre-war political shuffling

On September 15, 2002, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lindsey estimated the high limit on the cost of the Bush administration's plan in 2002 of invasion and regime change in Iraq to be 1-2% of GNP, or about $100–$200 billion. Mitch Daniels, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, subsequently discounted this estimate as "very, very high" and stated that the costs would be between $50–$60 billion. This lower figure was endorsed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who called Lindsey's estimate "baloney".

Lindsey left immediately after...

a high limit of 200bn and he had to leave

[Guynemer]

10/10

[Guynemer]

I still love this piece of pre-war political shuffling

On September 15, 2002, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Lindsey estimated the high limit on the cost of the Bush administration's plan in 2002 of invasion and regime change in Iraq to be 1-2% of GNP, or about $100–$200 billion. Mitch Daniels, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, subsequently discounted this estimate as "very, very high" and stated that the costs would be between $50–$60 billion. This lower figure was endorsed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who called Lindsey's estimate "baloney".

Lindsey left immediately after...

a high limit of 200bn and he had to leave

Jesus mother****ing Christ, our entire ****ing country is run by (and inhabited by) complete incompetents.

[Tupac Shakur]

How much did the actual invasion and regime change in Iraq cost? It would be interesting to see how much the post-regime change nation building has cost in comparison.

[The Vagabond]

Well as I pointed out, in 1990 the USSR had a measily public death of $ 200 billion, a debt that amounted to a mere 10 % to 20 % of its GNP. If that's bankruptcy then most First World governments today are bankrupt many times over that.

In fact, one cannot apply the same logic to the Western and Soviet economies. Even if the Soviet GDP was formally (PPP) ~$2 trillion, the bulk of the economy was noncompetive on the world market. The debt of ~$200 billion must be compared just against the competitive part of the economy, and not against the whole GDP PPP. After all, it is only the former part that could be used to handle foreign debt. If we compare it in this way, the debt of ~$200 billion was catastrophic for the Soviet economy, especially given the plummeting of oil prices in the 1980s.

On the other hand, I agree with you as far as the role of releasing the repressed ideas in the collapse of the Soviet Union is concerned.

[Pax]

I don't know how many people on this thread grew up during the cold war but I would have to say that all of us still living(overall) won. I was deathly afraid of nuclear winter or the depictions of whole cities being disintegrated(not blown up). At the same time, a number of places were the cold war was actually fought may be losers. Places were there is extreme poverty, death and war.

[Egbert]

[q] you ****.

Not the most eloquent and rational argument I have ever seen.

[Dinner]

...by goading the USSR into a bankrupting militarism.



If one accepts this premise, must one also acknowledge that Osama bin Laden has won the War on Terror?

Wow! We won the war on terror... Oh, wait...

[Berzerker]

Not the most eloquent and rational argument I have ever seen.

you've seen better from him?

[Fake Boris]

You claimed military spendings are fixed.

They're not.

Neither is entitlement spending, you ****. What do you think I was mocking?

What do you mean by "fixed" ?

[Tupac Shakur]

You tell me. You're the dumb**** who brought the irrelevant issue of "fixed" costs (whatever the **** you meant by that) into this discussion.