I did not saay I did not know I just did not say. So Ha! lol

Oh yeah, and my macroeconomics course finally covered this area.

The US takes in trillions and trillions of dollars.  So far we have seen no significant effects of tax cuts or the war on the economy.  In fact, do you know what the biggest piece of the money pie is on the US budget?  Social security.  In fact, some girl made an idiot out of herself in class by grossly overestimating the money we spend on the war.

So ewm, if you really want to 'save our economy', go out and kill all the old people.  That will save much much much much more money than stopping the war.

I actually do think it is necessary to keep armed forces in Iraq as the local executive is not strong enough to deal with violence and terrorism without support. It's a tragedy all this happend but now that the war has been declared over it's the least the military can do: support the local institutions to establish a stable government. This will take years, many years but if they leave Iraq now we will earn much more chaos as there already is.
It's a lose-lose-situation. It's dangerous to stay and you won't earn any credits for risking your live; the opposite will happen. If you leave things will only get much worse.
Whatever you might have thought about this war there's no alternative to keeping troops down there and try to prevent Iraq from slipping on an even more violent and chaotic level. But that's something the US should have had in mind when they invaded Iraq. I'm not sure if they had... The real war always begins after the war is over.

I agree that the US budget defecit is not anywhere near as bad as it seems. As a percentage of overall GDP it is actually much smaller than the defecit in the 1930s before the Great Depression, even though it is bigger in absolute terms. The US GDP is a big animal, and the financial system is designed to some extend to operate on credit (that's why countries such as China and Japan buy US debt in exchange for what they can get in return (they're not doin it out of the good of their hearts, especially China). The debt is bought in exchange for services. And there are other wealthy economies, such as the UK, which operate a budget defecit (and in the case of the UK it's no doubt a larger chunk of overall GDP).

The only thing I don't like about the credit based system is the tendency of banks to lend money too readily when things are going "well", often to people who cannot really afford it. When the credit isn't sustainable it comes back to bite you. The money doesn't really exist in that case, so it literally gets shaved off companies in the guise of stock value. The current mortgage "crisis" is the banks' fault, and they should pay. It doesn't have to affect the wider economy significantly.

I'm no economics expert, but a little knowledge can go a long way. If the US economy goes into recession it will be because of bad decisions by bad bankers giving money to people who cannot afford to pay it back. The budget defecit is financed by other economies, and is a separate issue methinks.