When George W. Bush was President, we complained when Bush offered, year after year, record-breaking budgets for military spending. Now, for the second year in a row, Barack Obama is doing the same.
This year, Obama has proposed a Pentagon budget of $708 billion dollars, larger than anything Bush ever spent. It’s bigger than his record-breaking military budget of last year. Are we supposed to sit back and cheer, because it’s Barack Obama who’s brought us this puffed-up budget?
Unlike the one-time expenditure of 700 billion dollars in the Troubled Asset Relief Program bailout, the federal government won’t get any of the 708 billion dollars in defense spending this year. It’s gone for good, and we’ll get another bill of the same size, if not bigger, next year, and the year after that.
A significant degree of Barack Obama’s victory over the other top Democratic presidential candidates in 2008 can be attributed to his opposition to the invasion of Iraq back in 2003. Hillary Clinton could have easily topped Obama, if it weren’t for the vigorous opposition to her candidacy from large numbers of anti-war Democrats who never forgave her for voting in favor of the American invasion. Peace activists in 2008 thought they would be getting a President in Obama who would see things at least a little bit more their way.
That’s not what we saw in last year’s military budget, and it’s not what we’re seeing this year either. Last year, Democrats made excuses for Obama. Give him some more time to get settled into the Oval Office, they said, and then we’ll all see some real changes.
What are those Democrats going to say now? Will they acknowledge the failure of Obama to bring change, or will they change their ideology to suit their leader?
You’ll love this: More Nukes for the arsenal: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100202/ap_on_re_us/us_nuclear_lab_budgets_1
Oh, yeah. I’m just oozing with love for that hypocrisy. Nobel Peace Prize winner to spend 7 billion dollars on how to make nuclear weapons more powerful. With Democrats like Obama, who needs Republicans?
Thanks for the link.
Well, i guess if there were any doubters left of Obama’s pedigree, this’ll convince them.
Full speed ahead for the ship of state over the cliff.
Typical liberals don’t know a thing about military spending.
The budget is PERSONNEL DRIVEN. Meaning a military with plenty of active volunteers in a state of war is naturally going to be expensive. In fact compared to the stimulus the military is employing far more people. Not enough goes to research, development, and procurement.
It isn’t about making nuclear weapons more powerful. It is about ensuring our nuclear missiles and gravity bombs are reliable, accurate, and powerful enough to ensure MAD holds true. As the nuclear arsenal has been steadily decreased via treaties, it is important to ensure those nukes we have are still an equally effective deterrent and will go boom if needed.
William, I’m just a typical liberal, so maybe I don’t understand this: How is it that you can say in one sentence that “It isn’t about making nuclear weapons more powerful,” and then in the next sentence say that “It is about ensuring our nuclear missiles… are powerful enough.”
I’m just a ditz, so maybe you could explain to me how our big military deterrent prevented the attacks of September 11, 2001. Try to use small words, because I’m just a typical liberal.
The 2008 700 billion dollar bailout has swelled to nearly 24 trillion and the banks got that not the Government. Oh I am sure the politicians got their palms greased. The people got nothing! The great bank heist of 2008 was passed mainly because Mr Obama convinced the Congressional Black Caucus to pass the bill!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32010841/ns/business-us_business
911 did exactly what Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Wolfowitz had planned; it increase our spending for the military!
Left/right? Who can tell the difference? Both are corrupt, both love this war, and both don’t give a dam about the people here or overseas. Oh there may be a few but for the most part I find the left and right pretty pathetic.