BUSH’S WAR CHEST
(Written in 2006)
The belief that the sole moral obligation of humankind is the improvement of human welfare. If you have discarded the notion that the Bush regime isn’t gearing up for global war, think again. Tallying up the 2006 fiscal year’s budget for defense presents an alarming signal that the White House isn’t at all about spreading a peaceful democracy around the world, while at the same time spreading thin American’s quality of life.
It makes sense when you look at President Bush’s defense budget for the fiscal year of 2006, which is riddled with contradictions and duplicity. By the time Congress gets done with it, the Heritage Foundation's broad factors of the "Index of Economic Freedom" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_economic_freedom will be based, not to economic freedom, but US military control.
Today’s defense budget is $421.1 billion. Adding the $85 billion the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) price tag to continue fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is separate from the $82 billion recently requested and approved for 2005, American’s are paying for the highest Department of Defense budget since 1952.
You could add on the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapon program and this total then goes up to $526 billion, as the sum total of the 2006 national security budget.
But we’re not through yet. You need to add on the homeland security spending at $40.4 billion, foreign policy and international stability at $31.7 billion, and the human consequences of current and other wars in the form of the Department of Veterans Affairs at a tune of $68.3 billion.
The unbelievably grand total comes to $667.2 billion, which exceeds any annual sum this country has ever paid for security in any war at anytime. But the CBO claims this an inadequate amount, citing in 2004 that there was a $250 billion shortage in the Pentagon’s 2005-2009 plan. One can appreciate the price menagerie of Cold War weapons the Pentagon craves, but to say they are underfunded is absurd.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has been countering with Congressional concerns of “over-programming” by scheduling a $30 million program cut, which he knows full well “won’t happen due to Pentagon bureaucrats-in-uniform and pork-sized members of Congress.”
What about the uniformed warrior’s needs and compensation? Just as Rumsfeld has chosen to exploit and exacerbate paying for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the veteran’s community has been demanding gigantic increases in its healthcare, retirement and survivor’s benefits. This has whipped the political parties into a frenzy of each trying to outdo the other that in turn allows Rumsfeld to “wring compliance out of Congress” by sinking his excessive budget costs behind skeptic’s backs.
Budget cosmetics is the name of the game. For example, with the reorganization of the Army into smaller brigades and adding 30,000 troops, authorized by Congress last year, these expenses were dubbed “emergency” supplemental expenses so it wouldn’t count under the budget rule when “calculating whether the federal government heeds or fails to heed, spending ceilings for appropriations.”
Considering Bush’s expanding portfolio of a premature war of choice whose end is not in sight and an approach of transforming the military on unproven technologies that are cost prohibited for a large scale conventional war rather than countering terrorism, the investment amounts to astronomical costs that are virtually non-guaranteed. This is not the optimal strategy in keeping America safe and economically stable.
The Unified Security Budget has offered a way to balance our security budget without worsening the fiscal crisis. “It identifies $53.1 billion in cuts from the military budget and explains why each of them can be made with no sacrifice to security. The report goes on to identify “$40.4 billion in additional spending on nonmilitary tools and explains the role of each in building a more secure world.”
There is little quality assurance in Bush’s defense budget. We see an overwhelming expense that “allocates seven times as much on the military as on homeland security and all other nonmilitary security programs combined.” This is due to redundant weapons systems that have little or no relevance on fighting terrorism or peacekeeping stability operations. Additionally, the US military forces are currently overstretched in a poor-executed occupation of Iraq, by comparison the Taliban were defeated by a few thousand US troops and the continuing effort to capture Osama bin Laden with a stationary force of less than 20,000 troops.
What is more appalling is that Bush has spent $200 billion in seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was agreed that during the 2004 presidential campaign the top priority of the US was to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but to date only $1 billion has been allocated, “hardly spending commensurate with the label ‘top priority.’”
Bush continues to ignore the necessity of nonmilitary reallocation of resources that provide security through broad-based international affairs programs such as humanitarian organizations by “underwriting the sale of US made weapons to mostly nondemocratic regimes around the world.”
The public debate has yet to be fully heard, as American’s are starting to feel the affect of Bush’s overemphasis on building a military force to combat his version of terrorism. He has exacerbated the balance of social programs and has created a major escalation of federal deficits “compounded by a series of major tax cuts, has increased pressure on spending for our citizen’s education, health care, environmental protection, social security, and other public services.” Worse yet, within his ramping up for global war against terrorism, Bush has cut budgets for energy efficiency that would give America independence from foreign oil markets.
The Bush administration continues to suggest that the average American is ultimately benefiting from his liberation of Iraq, though the cost burdens to taxpayers is a detriment to their constitutional right for prosperity. And evidence further down the ladder, as I’ve already documented with the war profiteering goes even further.
We need to make a dramatic shift to nonmilitary means of securing our national security, a debate that has failed to keep pace in Congress. American’s need to connect to the fact that we have only so much in resource allocations, which our president refuses to acknowledge and clearly has a hidden agenda of global domination through military force.
(Written in 2006)
The belief that the sole moral obligation of humankind is the improvement of human welfare. If you have discarded the notion that the Bush regime isn’t gearing up for global war, think again. Tallying up the 2006 fiscal year’s budget for defense presents an alarming signal that the White House isn’t at all about spreading a peaceful democracy around the world, while at the same time spreading thin American’s quality of life.
It makes sense when you look at President Bush’s defense budget for the fiscal year of 2006, which is riddled with contradictions and duplicity. By the time Congress gets done with it, the Heritage Foundation's broad factors of the "Index of Economic Freedom" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_economic_freedom will be based, not to economic freedom, but US military control.
Today’s defense budget is $421.1 billion. Adding the $85 billion the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) price tag to continue fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is separate from the $82 billion recently requested and approved for 2005, American’s are paying for the highest Department of Defense budget since 1952.
You could add on the Department of Energy’s nuclear weapon program and this total then goes up to $526 billion, as the sum total of the 2006 national security budget.
But we’re not through yet. You need to add on the homeland security spending at $40.4 billion, foreign policy and international stability at $31.7 billion, and the human consequences of current and other wars in the form of the Department of Veterans Affairs at a tune of $68.3 billion.
The unbelievably grand total comes to $667.2 billion, which exceeds any annual sum this country has ever paid for security in any war at anytime. But the CBO claims this an inadequate amount, citing in 2004 that there was a $250 billion shortage in the Pentagon’s 2005-2009 plan. One can appreciate the price menagerie of Cold War weapons the Pentagon craves, but to say they are underfunded is absurd.
Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has been countering with Congressional concerns of “over-programming” by scheduling a $30 million program cut, which he knows full well “won’t happen due to Pentagon bureaucrats-in-uniform and pork-sized members of Congress.”
What about the uniformed warrior’s needs and compensation? Just as Rumsfeld has chosen to exploit and exacerbate paying for the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the veteran’s community has been demanding gigantic increases in its healthcare, retirement and survivor’s benefits. This has whipped the political parties into a frenzy of each trying to outdo the other that in turn allows Rumsfeld to “wring compliance out of Congress” by sinking his excessive budget costs behind skeptic’s backs.
Budget cosmetics is the name of the game. For example, with the reorganization of the Army into smaller brigades and adding 30,000 troops, authorized by Congress last year, these expenses were dubbed “emergency” supplemental expenses so it wouldn’t count under the budget rule when “calculating whether the federal government heeds or fails to heed, spending ceilings for appropriations.”
Considering Bush’s expanding portfolio of a premature war of choice whose end is not in sight and an approach of transforming the military on unproven technologies that are cost prohibited for a large scale conventional war rather than countering terrorism, the investment amounts to astronomical costs that are virtually non-guaranteed. This is not the optimal strategy in keeping America safe and economically stable.
The Unified Security Budget has offered a way to balance our security budget without worsening the fiscal crisis. “It identifies $53.1 billion in cuts from the military budget and explains why each of them can be made with no sacrifice to security. The report goes on to identify “$40.4 billion in additional spending on nonmilitary tools and explains the role of each in building a more secure world.”
There is little quality assurance in Bush’s defense budget. We see an overwhelming expense that “allocates seven times as much on the military as on homeland security and all other nonmilitary security programs combined.” This is due to redundant weapons systems that have little or no relevance on fighting terrorism or peacekeeping stability operations. Additionally, the US military forces are currently overstretched in a poor-executed occupation of Iraq, by comparison the Taliban were defeated by a few thousand US troops and the continuing effort to capture Osama bin Laden with a stationary force of less than 20,000 troops.
What is more appalling is that Bush has spent $200 billion in seeking weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was agreed that during the 2004 presidential campaign the top priority of the US was to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but to date only $1 billion has been allocated, “hardly spending commensurate with the label ‘top priority.’”
Bush continues to ignore the necessity of nonmilitary reallocation of resources that provide security through broad-based international affairs programs such as humanitarian organizations by “underwriting the sale of US made weapons to mostly nondemocratic regimes around the world.”
The public debate has yet to be fully heard, as American’s are starting to feel the affect of Bush’s overemphasis on building a military force to combat his version of terrorism. He has exacerbated the balance of social programs and has created a major escalation of federal deficits “compounded by a series of major tax cuts, has increased pressure on spending for our citizen’s education, health care, environmental protection, social security, and other public services.” Worse yet, within his ramping up for global war against terrorism, Bush has cut budgets for energy efficiency that would give America independence from foreign oil markets.
The Bush administration continues to suggest that the average American is ultimately benefiting from his liberation of Iraq, though the cost burdens to taxpayers is a detriment to their constitutional right for prosperity. And evidence further down the ladder, as I’ve already documented with the war profiteering goes even further.
We need to make a dramatic shift to nonmilitary means of securing our national security, a debate that has failed to keep pace in Congress. American’s need to connect to the fact that we have only so much in resource allocations, which our president refuses to acknowledge and clearly has a hidden agenda of global domination through military force.
http://www.heritage.org/Index/
Compiled from Center For Defense Information’s, The Defense Monitor, Volume XXXIV, Number 2 – March/April 2005
_The Mess in the Defense Budget, by Winslow T. Wheeler, Visiting Senior Fellow, and A Unified Security Budget for the United States, 2006: Balancing Military and Nonmilitary Tools, by Marcus Corbin, Senior Analyst_
Compiled from Center For Defense Information’s, The Defense Monitor, Volume XXXIV, Number 2 – March/April 2005
_The Mess in the Defense Budget, by Winslow T. Wheeler, Visiting Senior Fellow, and A Unified Security Budget for the United States, 2006: Balancing Military and Nonmilitary Tools, by Marcus Corbin, Senior Analyst_
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