It would be easier to tolerate some of the budget hysteria if someone in Washington had the guts to chop the defense budget down to size. The military's feeding frenzy has to stop, yet neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are serious about doing anything. There's something fundamentally wrong if this is truly "the minimum level of funding we can live with."
ThinkProgress has the gory details.
Indeed, while Gates promised to cut $78 billion over five years, most of that reduction would take place in 2014 and 2015. As Center for American Progress senior fellow and President Reagan’s former assistant secretary of defense Larry Korb points out, Obama’s request is “5% higher than what the Defense Department plans to spend this year. In inflation-adjusted dollars, this figure is higher than at any time during the Bush years or during the Cold War.” In fact, the total military budget this year “comes in at a thumping $750 billion — an annual tax of more than $7,000 on every household in the country.” And while there are clear ways to cut $1 trillion from the Pentagon budget, it seems that many in the GOP have no intention of doing so.While we're at it, can someone explain why we're still stuck in either the quagmire in Afghanistan or the other one in Iraq? We could certainly use the spare cash at home as opposed to it being stuffed in the pockets of corrupt politicians overseas and dropped off in banks in Dubai. Let them get their own money.
