[quote=svelte]If we can afford to spend $1 trillion to $2 trillion (projected total expenditure from this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/washington/19cost.html – also the original Bush Administration extimate for the Iraq War? $50 to $60 billion) looking for WMD in Iraq, then surely we can spend $1 trillion saving our own a$$.

I still fail to comprehend the number of people who, even after studying the Great Depression in school, still seem to think no govt intervention is the right answer.[/quote]

I won’t dispute you on the relative merit of war expenditures, but…

There are robust arguments that the gov’t caused the “Great” Depression. See Rothbard’s “America’s Great Depression for a start: http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Great-Depression-Murray-Rothbard/dp/0945466056/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221927310&sr=8-1

Of course, we don’t typically receive this perspective from state-run schools.