Don’t Give the Pentagon a Blank Check
Feb 04, 2010
When President Obama proposed a freeze on discretionary spending over the next three years in his State of the Union address, he exempted the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as spending by the Pentagon.
Write a letter to the editor of your local paper today to oppose this exemption!
The President’s decision to freeze domestic expenditures but not defense spending is wrong, especially when total defense spending for next year exceeds $733 billion, including almost $160 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Exempting defense spending from the budget axe does not make sense when the country is facing so much red ink. The political pressure to save Pentagon pork is tremendous despite the many expensive weapons programs that are faulty or unneeded.
Since September 11th, 2001, the Pentagon’s budget has more than doubled, from $333 billion to $733 billion in just nine years. At the same time, our economy has suffered the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Any serious attempt to spur an economic recovery has to take the massive defense budget seriously.
Write a letter to the editor of your local paper! Explain how the exemption of the defense budget from the freeze on discretionary spending is not only illogical, but contrary to the President’s goals.
Please send us a copy of your submission, and let us know if your letter gets published.
Where is the Pentagon’s Freeze?
Jan 28, 2010
Freeze? What Freeze?
An article in the Washington Independent today, in which I’m quoted, points to one – particularly glaring – problem with President Obama’s proposed spending freeze: Why does the proposal exclude defense spending?
From the piece, by Spencer Ackerman:
But while Obama did not rule out future defense cuts in the speech, many of these defense wonks could not understand why an effort at deficit reduction would explicitly exclude defense spending. “Defense spending is over half our discretionary spending,” Olson said. “It would be crazy not to include it. It begs the question whether this is a real effort.” Shortly before the speech, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the speaker of the House, told reporters that any spending freeze ought to include defense spending.
[snip]
Still, Todd Harrison, an defense-budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said he believed the combination of massive defense budgets, massive federal deficits and a weak economy would inevitably compel Congress and the president to cut defense. “It’s likely in the future that everything will come under pressure, defense included,” Harrison said. But he conceded that a variable in that calculation is “political will” for such cuts — which is not in evidence in either the White House or, especially, the Congress, which loves to send defense money back home to individual states and districts.
Also today, Fred Kaplan writes that, “If some Rip Van Winkle had fallen asleep in 1982, woken up in 2009, and looked at the U.S. military budget as an indicator of what was going on in the world, he would assume that the Cold War were still raging.” He notes that, while every aspect of the Pentagon’s budget should not be subject to a spending freeze, there is certainly a large chunk that should.