Topic: Politics
I was going through the numbers at the White House webpage. To change the year, simply go to the location bar and change the fy2007 portion to match the year of your concern (it'll work fine to the Bush Admin).
While we all know that Bush spends a lot on the military and his calls for cutting the "pork barrel" projects are a bit hypocritical, I wanted to demonstrate so with the budget numbers. To the best of my knowledge, these totals are all "actual" and not projected budget numbers. Feel free to correct me if I've made an error.
Perhaps the most alarming thing I found was when including the Iraq/Afghanistan supplemental bills, total military spending accounted for anywhere between 54% to almost 63% of our total "discretionary" budget. Since 2002 (Bush's first budget), it has not accounted for less than 1/5 of our total budget... in 2003 and 2004, it was over one quarter of it, 2005 was just under that mark.
Another thing that bothered me was just the typicals. Not including emergency funding supplementals (ie just using the as passed budgets), the annual increase of our military spending was no less than half of our discretionary spending increase (ranging between 50% to 97%, averaging 69%).
Finally, the percentage of our military spending (not including supplementals) with respect to our discretionary spending has steadily increased from 47% in 2001 to 52.5% in 2006. So we now pass budgets that have over half of our discretionary spending go to the military. In 2006, our military spending increased by nearly 50% compared to 2001. That 50% totals an over $140 billion increase. That's $140 billion of spending in a year. Imagine if that went into our infrastructure and not getting lost in the military industrial complex.
Richard thought this
at 5:58 PM EDT
