Iraq withdrawl will drive unemployment higher.

One dirty little secret not mentioned by politicians nor the press is that following every war the unemployment rate; not surprisingly goes up. The two plans in the works now are a 16 or 23 month withdrawal from Iraq. Up to 30,000 troops may go to Afghanistan but many more Americans are leaving Iraq as contractors and will not be needed in Afghanistan due to a lack of size and developed infrastructure. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that unemployment will go to 9%. Look at the chart above and you can see that at the end of the Vietnam war in 1975 there is a spike and in 1991 at the end of the first Iraq war there is a spike, so look for a marginal increase of at least 1/2% to 1% on the unemployment rate. There is a better chance than not that we exceed the unemployment rate of the early 1980's especially when only $30 billion of the near $1 trillion stimulus is for infrastructure. Clean energy is a nice idea but creating "green collar" jobs results in the loss of "black collar" dirty fossil fuel jobs. Just remember we had a $160 billion stimulus package in February 2008 that failed to do what was intended, though I am sure that everyone that advocated it would throw out the red herring that things would have been worse with inaction just like we hear now.