US Wars of Choice may cause the dollar’s collapse

US Involvement across the globe in its numerous war settings has placed a heavy financial burden on US taxpayers who are no longer capable of carrying this debt level.

As with all past attempts of governance, war has been the mechanism to both unite the people and provide for an economy, in short it didn’t work for the Roman or Grecian empires and it won’t work for the American empire either.

Using history as a reference, we have experienced no less than 212 different empires attempt to rule, with the US included that number is 213, each failed. And America is failing as this article is written.

What is bringing America to its knees is ego. Ego is an exaggerated sense of self-importance; the self, especially as distinct from the world and other selves.

What we want, we take, and that is not how to make peace in the world. It is how to turn the world against us. And we are already witnessing a growing discontent.

And now because of ego, we are caught up in struggles across the globe, mostly for oil, but also for control and to expand our footprint, and oh yes, and for profit, a military war complex, and machine that grinds our tax dollars into weapons, for war.

One look at the Pentagon’s "base budget" request for fiscal 2011 (which begins October 1) calls for some $549 billion, an increase of $18 billion over the appropriation for the current fiscal year.

But that is only the beginning. The administration is in addition requesting another $160 billion for "Overseas Contingency Operations" (OCO) that’s to pay for wars and occupations in Iraq , Afghanistan , and elsewhere.

But there is more, $25 billion plus in military spending outside the "Department of Defense," much of that for nuclear weapons included in the Department of Energy's budget. (This $25 billion could be much larger, depending on what is included.)

The grand total - comes to at least $734 billion. There is an additional $33 billion "emergency supplemental" appropriation to pay for the Afghanistan escalation; it's said to cost $1 million to maintain one soldier there for a year. That $33 billion would be counted as part of FY 2010 spending, and, of course, there may be a supplemental in 2011 as well. The total has more than doubled in the last decade and continues to rise. It may well top (1) trillion this fiscal year.

What has this budget accomplished?

Wars make people less safe, if that is the purpose of this and the past administration, they have accomplished their goal. But in doing so, they may have created a dichotomy from which our dollar may well collapse.