WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon is the big winner in President Bush's proposed budget for next year, while domestic items such as aid to schools and grants to local governments will get slight increases.
Medicare and Medicaid, the health program for the poor and disabled, would shoulder modest but politically difficult cost curbs in the budget the White House is submitting to Congress on Monday…
Bush's spending plan totals almost $3 trillion for the budget year starting October 1…
The Pentagon, which also consumes one-sixth of the overall budget, would get an 11 percent increase, to $481.4 billion in its core budget. And that is before accounting for an additional $235 billion in war costs over the next year and a half.
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In summation: US military spending for this year if Bush has his way: $480 billion + ~$200 billion for Iraq. Something approaching ¾ of a TRILLION dollars.
A couple of other notes (source here):
* world military spending having reached the $1 trillion mark in 2004
* The top five nations and their military budgets (2005 Budgets):
1. US: ~$500 billion
2. China: ~$62 billion
3. Russia: ~$62 billion
4. UK: ~$51 billion
5. Japan: ~$45 billion
I look at this, and Bush and his “small gov’t” budget, and I wonder: If the Bush supporters had their way – if no one complained and they had their sweetest military fantasies come true – what would our military budget be?
Would $1 trillion dollars a year buy our security? $2 trillion?
Where would it end?
Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
~James Madison
11 comments:
I dislike the budget proposals just as much as you do, although for different reasons. Too much government involvement period, little odds where it's spent.
Speaking of which, every budget time there is the old saw of "Just imagine what we could do with $500 billion if we weren't squandering it on the military! This demonstrates a false and misplaced view of money as something real.
Let's suppose that the president and Congress has a sudden change of heart and revise the budget to allow $100 billion for the military and designate the other $400 billion for social programs.
People imagine all the food, housing, education, and health care that money would buy for the poor.
But it wouldn't. You can transfer the money with a stroke of the pen, but it takes many months to generate food, housing, medical and educational personnel, etc. The result would be that there would be just about as much food available for the poor, only it would cost more, just about as much medical care available as before, only it would cost more.
I've said it before, government is just like energy. The solution, the ONLY solution is to use less of it. If it hadn't been for government bidding up the price of education and health care, millions and millions more people could afford it out of pocket than can do so now.
Like the opinions on a previous post here, there is an unrealistic enthusiasm and exuberance about government solutions just as in that post there was an unrealistic exuberance about technical solutions.
In both cases the only real solution is to use less.
it's rather amazing to look at our military budget compared to those of other countries. striking really. we are truly the biggest bully on the block.
It is peculiar that the folks that complain the most about taxes are the ones who insist we spend more $ on armaments than the rest of the world's nations put together.
Can anyone really say the world would become peaceful if the US withdrew all of its forward bases and stopped R&D.
How is the pic related to the blog? The pic's cute anyways
Thanks for the thoughts, all.
The dog photo is because of the title, "Dogs of war," Justin. Not that dogs go to war or anything silly as that. It takes humans to accomplish a really good war.
Rusty, I can guarantee you that the world will NOT become peaceful if the US withdrew its armies. How's that for an answer?
Now, will you answer: Will you guarantee that the world WILL become peaceful if we double our military budget? Triple it? Will we even find security (forget peacefulness) by doing so?
How large would YOUR military budget be and to what end?
Rusty,
1)Let's remember first that our "forward bases" are viewed by many of the people in those countries as alien presences, intrusions, even imperial outposts. Even British friends have pointed to our bases there (fifty odd years after WWII) and said, "the problem with you Yanks is that--even with your friends--you never leave!" If that's how our "forward bases" are viewed by friends like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, imagine how they are viewed in the Philippines, Indonesia, Kuwait, etc.
2)It's true that closing our empire of bases or otherwise cutting our military budget would not, in itself, promote peace. But if you redirect that money saved (Eleutheros to the contrary), you can do much to create a better world. For instance, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives proposes that the U.S. lead the G-8 nations in proposing taking 1-2% of Gross Domestic Product and investing it ending hunger, poverty, and disease worldwide--and doing so for 20 years. Now, this would be a significant amount of money--far more than our current non-military foreign aid, but much less than our military budget--but it would do far more to make us secure at home than would our arming ourselves to the teeth.
Dan,
I'm not a big fan of a ever-increasing military budget either. Your questions do remind me of questions I have concerning taxation - how much is too much, when will it end, why do liberals oppose tax decreases when it is shown to increase tax revenues, yada yada?
I guess I didn't answer your question. That's a hard one, not because I want the budget to be bigger, I just want spending to be enough, but how do we determine what that is? Sorry, I'm not much help, but in my idea world, taxes would be so much lower in the first place, so we would not have the option of a ballooning budget.
Michael:"But if you redirect that money saved (Eleutheros to the contrary), you can do much to create a better world."
I would urge you to rethink this. More money does not mean more (for example) food.
By the beginning of this decade the world was already heading into a food crisis (hence, the poor and hungry you are eager to feed). In six out of the seven years since then, world grain production has declined.
Satellite photography shows that right now 40% of the land on earth is being used for agriculture. Quite simply, there is no more land available to increase the world's food supply. Huge swaths of the Amazon are cleared each year to raise soybeans for the world food industry (replacing worn out acreage, not increasing the acreage). Indonesia and other tropical countries are engaged in massive deforestation in order to increase palm oil production.
Now added to this is the push for biofuels worldwide. The use of corn for ethanol in the US has already caused a 40% increase in the price of tortillas in Mexico. This might seem trivial, but it isn't. It has significantly increased the hunger problem of poor Mexicans.
Keep in mind that world food production as it is right now is gulping down unimaginable quantities of fossil fuels and depleting the world's soils.
So your increase in money allocated to buy food for the world's poor will do .... what? The only thing it can do is increase the price of food making the problem even worse.
I'm not good at economics, E, so you'll have to help me:
Let's take a real example. For our Christmas project this year at my church, we sent money to a bitterly poor Muslim community that lives off a dump outside a slightly wealthier college town in Morocco.
When I say they live off a dump, I mean that literally. They are shepherds who get much of their supplies from the dump they live on or near.
The money we send will hire a teacher for a year to teach them literacy. One purpose of this is to help them in developing a weaving project they've established. The weaving project allows them to sell goods they create to have money to afford food.
In what way does this small gift hurt?
Or, to better match your point, suppose that we sent an additional batch of money for the purpose of buying food so that, while they're in school learning to read, they also have some food to keep them from starving. Suppose that without the food, they couldn't afford to spend time away from the dump seeking sustenance?
This example seems like an ideal way for them to better themselves (by learning to read and other skills that will further let them be productive in the making and marketing of their goods, which will give them money to purchase food which will keep them from dying).
How is that going to drive up the cost of food?
And if this sort of program were expanded to hit every similarly poor community, what then?
I don't ask in jest, I fully understand the notion of unintended consequences. If, for instance, we flooded a poor village with corn to keep the folk there from starving, but one of the products they grew to make their living was corn, then I understand the notion that we may have driven down the price of corn making things worse for them.
I understand the problems of unintended consequences. But I don't think that means that every assistance effort is doomed to make things worse.
Help me out, here. What do you think?
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