Obama asks Congress to bust spending caps for defense
The Washington Post reports that in the budget that is being delivered to Congress today from the White House asks for 38 billion dollars more in defense spending than is currently allowed by law. Mostly, the spending is to pay for half-assing the war against terror over the last few years. As a smarter man once said, the enemy gets a vote in deciding when a war ends. Because the last two presidents and the last four Congresses weren’t committed to that war, it continues.
Defense is one of the few things that the Constitution says that government should be doing for the People, and it’s being done on the cheap and on credit cards. Imagine putting your mortgage and your food bills on credit cards to worry about paying it somewhere down the road while you load up on fancy cars and big screen TVs, too. That’s what is happening to the Federal budget. Instead of doing the necessary things like defense, the government is farting around with healthcare, free cell phones and needless food stamps – things Americans always did for themselves without freebies from Uncle Sugar.
Meanwhile, liberal Democrats, eager to fend off the Republican critique that excessive domestic spending and government waste have caused the Pentagon’s budget woes, cite the supporters of the 2003 Iraq war as the real problem.
“These are the same guys who voted for a war in Iraq and forgot how it was going to be paid for,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.), a possible Democratic presidential candidate. “You know how it’s paid for? It’s paid for on the credit card. We don’t know how much it will cost by the time we take care of the last veteran .?.?. $3 trillion or $4 trillion. They weren’t worried about that.”
I guess that Bernie would rather have Saddam Hussein back in power in Iraq – you know he misses the 90s when Hussein would mass his troops on the Kuwait border and we’d spend billions moving troops to Kuwait to stare at the sand. Or he misses Hussein’s air defenses shooting at US and NATO partners as they protected the Kurds. Maybe he misses al Qaeda building up in northern Iraq. Not to mention the $25,000 bounty he paid to Palestinian suicide bombers’ families in Israel.
And, oh, yeah, Mr. Sanders, all of that social spending that you’re doing for Obama phones and 3x/day school lunch programs is going on a credit card, too. Of course, Sanders wants to raise taxes on working Americans to pay for all of that, compounding the need for Federal spending on social programs.
Sanders is as much a coward on cutting social spending as the Republicans. But our national defense can’t keep being the scapegoat for the country’s budget woes. I know this is obvious to my readers, but maybe we have so many problems with our security suddenly because both sides are slashing national defense with reckless abandon.
Category: Big Pentagon, Congress sucks
Allowed by law? Which law might that be? We are barely 3% of GDP, which is pretty much a historic low.
Same thing as when Carter was prez. Cut it now and pay for it later…
These clowns give clowns a bad name. These idiots are real cowards and don’t have the balls it takes to stand for the right things.
Both parties are at fault.
Some days I am tempted to send them a check for my share of the national debt and tell them “I’m paid up…. from now on, you’re on your own.” But they would just screw my kids and grandkids.
$38 billion, huh? Did the F-35 program spit out another shiny new drone that the Glorious Leader just HAS to kill somebody with?
Fook him. He’s not serious about killing Islamic terrorists. Hell, he can’t even bring himself to say the words Islamic terrorists. So, what’s the funding request really about? I don’t know and I don’t much care.
2/17, maybe the extra defense money is to be used to supply everyone with new revised dictionaries that don’t have the word terrorist in them, they’ll all say “freedom fighter” instead.
The money will also go to supplying all infidels with copies or the Koran so that we can finish the conversion that this ” no longer a Christian nation” seems to be working toward so very fast.
So Bernie said, “They weren’t worried about that”. Ya know Bernie, we were worried about that. But we were also worried about people flying airplanes into our skyscrapers, poison gas in our subways, anthrax in the mail, and dirty bombs in our population centers.
We didn’t tell the Pentagon “you can only go to Iraq if it doesn’t cost anything” we said, “go to iraq and kill those bastards!”
And we meant it. Then you spent the next few years chipping away at the troop levels and the ROE. Our effectiveness went down and our casualties went up. Then Mr. Bush did the surge. You and your buddies proclaimed it a failure from the beginning and right through to when it proved that it was worked. Then you kept demanding that Mr. Obama withdraw the troops when it was clear to everyone with a brain that withdrawing was a stupid (as opposed to dumb or merely ignorant) thing to do. So now, here we are.
Mr. Sanders, please stop commanding the military, we have an entire department of the government for that and most of them understand the mission. Tell them what you want done then get the f**k out of the way. If you don’t want them to kill people and break things then don’t send them at all. But don’t promise that those islamist terrorists won’t come here.
“…liberal Democrats, eager to fend off the Republican critique that excessive domestic spending and government waste have caused the Pentagon’s budget woes…”
They can try, but among the radicals, that was the big plan all along. All that talk about “fundamental change” to the United States had to do with getting rid of Pax Americana, because in the eyes of his fellow-travelers, it’s a BAD thing we won WWII.
There was an article over the weekend in which an ISIS fighter was upset the warplanes in Syria were basically leaving nothing standing – they figured out where ISIS was, bombed the holy shit of them, and this ISIS guy is upset. Apparently “reaping what you sow” is not understood there. Or maybe we just aren’t being fair? Me, I’m thinking it’s the first hopeful factum I have seen.
Bring back neutron bombs. Better, Hadji?
Good idea!! use a few of those, then we take their oil and gold!!
drop ebola bodies on ’em
I love how he is now saying that he’s all about a budget, but Reid wouldn’t even let a single budget into committee in the Senate.
He also wants to raise taxes to help pay for this. But wait, he promised (twice) he wouldn’t raise taxes for anyone making less than 250K.
If Barry really gave a crap about the military, he’d put a stop to the drastic reductions in force that are going on now.
Personnel are getting pink slips and even having their contracts and regulations violated to get them separated. It takes members of congress, the IG, the media to get them to backtrack and at least do things the right way.
Why is that? Well, if the rest of DC isn’t following any actual rules, why should we? Cutting the budget is more important than loyalty.
Oh, wait, we’re getting more money? Oh, well, we won’t use that on personnel, we could get more people hired to work in one of the bureaucratic buildings here! And whatever is left over, well we’ll drop that on new equipment we don’t want or need…
As That great philosopher Frank Zappa said, “Do you love it, do you hate it, here it is, the way you made it.”
Suck it up, buttercup.
Oh, and a hearty bowl of STFU soup.