From the New York Times.
An informative article.
I'm not sure anybody would be dumb enough to call the Marshall Plan a bad investment, although I'm sure Germany probably didn't look like a financial bargain in 1948. As the article points out, this doesn't cover what we spent all through the Cold War to keep Europe from becoming a Soviet state. Was that a bad investment?
And how much did we spend rebuilding Japan and other nations? I haven't found any real figures for that, but no matter what we spent, the economic results in Japan alone over the following decades certainly long ago paid for it.
If we can pull off the same thing in Iraq that we did in Germany and Japan, we will have accomplished something worthwhile. A free and industrious people will have more to offer the world than oil.
I'm not sure, but I think the article compares Bush to Truman, too. ;)
A bit at the last is a little one-sided:
To put the request into a different kind of perspective, the Center for American Progress, a liberal advocacy group, said $87 billion is roughly equivalent to two years of unemployment benefits, 87 times what the federal government spends on after-school programs and more than 10 times the budget for the Environmental Protection Agency.
However, it is also less than 1/5 the annual Social Security outlay, 1/5 the annual Medicare/Medicaid outlay, and 1/4 the normal Defense budget. And if you throw in another 20 billion or so, you could build one (1) Space Station.
And hey, let's try and remember where a lot of the money ends up, huh? It's not like we're burying it in the sand.
Oh, by the way, the Center for American Progress was "founded" in July. It's an arm of the American Majority Institute, which is the new John Podesta think tank being generated by the Democratic Party. These liberal organizations breed like cockroaches, and the many and varied names hide the fact that about half of them operate out of the same offices. And hey, "liberal advocacy group" sounds a lot better than "Democrat Buttmonkeys."