KGB wants to know why so many Keynesian, "the debt is not an issue" lefties have become budget hawks where the Libyan war is concerned.  I'm certainly guilty of this.  When it comes to the economy, I'm so Keynesian that Keynes would question my sanity.  I have advocated using the powers of the Federal Reserve to pay people's credit card bills.  I believe that Social Security benefits should be expanded, not cut.

I am also against our military involvement in Libya and one of the reasons I'm against it is budgetary.  Am I a hypocrite?  Probably.  But not on this issue.  A list of reasons why:

1) The liberal intervenionists and neocons who support the war have also tended to support fiscal austerity in other areas of the economy.  So the costs very much matter to them and they are very loudly saying that they would rather spend money on cruise missiles than teacher pensions.  We should be clear on that. Or as Jon Stewart said, "You can't simultaneously fire teachers and cruise missiles."

2)  Keynesian spending is supposed to stimulate the economy.  Spending money on a war in Libya seems a really inefficient way of doing that.  It would be more stimulative to just move the Libyan rebels over here and to set them up with high paying jobs so that they can buy iPads and save the economy.  Or, we could just stay out of it and give money to school districts so that they don't have to fire their teachers.

3)  Obama's stance on Social Security is still, after all this time, uncertain.  The budgetary pressures of a third war do not improve the odds that he will resists Social Security cuts at all costs.

4) The major problem for the economy is unemployment.  Guess what?  Combat veterans are, as a group, enduring higher unemployment than the rest of society.  11.5% of them in 2010.  This has been a persistent problem.  Constant war fighting does not leave people in a great position to do Powerpoint presentations after they leave the service.  War is bad for the soldiers who do the fighting.  That's why we're supposed to go into combat only sparingly.

5) In the comments to kgb's post, Genghis wrote a funny bit about good deficits and bad deficits. Genghis' excellent humor aside, there really are good and bad deficits.  Good deficits would either finance economic activity at such a velocity that the debt could be paid off, or would be incurred to build things of lasting value that would finance future growth.  If you borrow money for the purposes of building an income producing asset, you stand a chance of coming out ahead.  Hard to see how war with Libya is a "productive asset."

If everyone involved in the budget debate were a Keynesian, some of my objections would go away because nobody would say "you can't have that pension plan because we spent the money in Libya."  But even absent that, I would still object to spending money in this manner as we could do so many other more productive things instead.