Military Funding and the Iraq War
President Bush is inadvertently drawing attention to the huge amounts of money directed to military spending in the United States.
Mr. Bush is claiming that Congress’ attempts to limit the length of the Iraq war by placing language to such effect in the $124 Billion supplemental bills will hurt American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
What Mr. Bush fails to acknowledge is:
- That HE would be the one to halt the supplemental funding process by carrying out his threatened veto.
- That the military budget for Fiscal Year 2007 is $481 Billion dollars not counting Iraq war funding.
- That the above $481 Billion in the normal defense appropriations alredy included about $70 billion for Iraq war related expenses
- That the U.S. has already spent over $414 billion on the Iraq war
- That the $124 Billion emergency supplemental funding for the war is in addition to the $414 billion already spent on the Iraq war and is in addition to the $489 Billion dollar FY military budget
- That the Congressional Research Service has indicated that the Pentagon can get along just fine without the additional money through July by juggling other accounts in its half-trillion-dollar budget.
- That last year facing the same deadlines, the Republican Congress didn’t get around to approving a supplemental $94.4 billion in war-fighting money until June without hectoring by the White House
So let’s take this a step further. Could there possibly be any FAT in the Pentagon’s almost half trillion dollar budget for this year?
Well we see in the spreadsheet for the U.S. Budget that there are some interesting categories that could be looked at.
How about the $73 Billion dollars that is supposed to be spent this year on Research and Development?
How about the $84 Billion dollars that is supposed to be spent this year on Procurement? Do we actually need all the aircraft and missiles that may be in the budget that could perhaps have been more suited to a conflict with the former Soviet Union?
How about the almost $13 Billion dollars that is supposed to be spent this year on Military Construction? Didn’t the BRAC commission just a short time ago propose to close a bunch of U.S. military bases?
The cartoon below is a few years old. We now spend 56% of the Federal Budget on military expenditures (see pie chart above). But the cartoon gives you a good idea about the enormity of money our government spends on the military relative to all of our other pressing domestic and international needs.
[...] 56% of US budget spent on the military while Sweden invests 1/2 of their money in social programs, social programs show up as less than 1% of the US’ spending while national defense is over 56% (tags: politics why_you_should_never_go_to_the_US things_to_Fucked_up_to_be_imaginable bush military money taxes) [...]