Re: Oh What a Lovely Budget Item

"According to ABC, the cost of Obama's kinetic spending reached $600 million
in its first week. The Pentagon estimates that the total could reach $800
million by the end of September, and the Pentagon just might be lowballing."

 

Uh yea I would say someone is lowballing.  I get that the first week had a
flurry of cruise missile strikes, but there is no way I will buy that we
spend 600M in a week, and then only 200M more in 5 or 6 months.

 

From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On
Behalf Of Bruce Geerdes
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2011 1:16 PM
To: DADL (off topic)
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] Oh What a Lovely Budget Item

 

YES. I've had it to here with "fiscal responsibility" Republicans that
exclude our military spending.

 

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 2:08 PM, david white <[email protected]> wrote:

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/01/oh-what-a-lovely-budget-item

Oh What a Lovely Budget Item
For a neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water's edge.
Jesse Walker | April 1, 2011

When Bill Kristol endorsed America's intervention in Libya, the Weekly
Standard editor was being completely consistent with everything else he has
said about American foreign policy. He just wasn't being consistent with his
pose as a proponent of fiscal restraint. It's bracing to watch Kristol twirl
so easily from denouncing "the Democrats' orgy of spending" and complaining
about Republicans who "don't have a credible plan to deal with the debt or
the deficit" to jubilating that the president "didn't shrink from defending
the use of force." But the pundit's gyrations can't obscure a basic reality:
You can pay your bills or you can be a global policeman, but you can't do
both. Not in 2011.

According to ABC, the cost of Obama's kinetic spending reached $600 million
in its first week. The Pentagon estimates that the total could reach $800
million by the end of September, and the Pentagon just might be lowballing.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments, has told The National Journal that the price tag could "easily
pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things
go." And if things don't go well...

But let's stick, for the moment, with the costs of that initial week. That's
already more than half the amount House Republicans have asked to cut from
Americorps. It's more than twice the amount they've asked to cut from
Amtrak.
It's nearly four times the size of National Public Radio's entire operating
budget for fiscal year 2011, including the parts that come from private
sources. All this for just a week of a war that-unlike our invasions and
occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan-doesn't even pretend to be an act of
self-
defense. (When Kristol endorsed a spending freeze, he made an explicit
exception for "national security." I realize that "national security" is
usually a euphemism for "anything remotely related to foreign policy," but
just for fun, let's take it literally. Does anyone out there seriously
believe NATO's planes are in Libya's skies to keep Americans secure?)

And what about those troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the price tag
isn't threatening to hit a billion but long ago topped a trillion? It goes
without saying that Kristol and his cohort still support both wars even as
they're eager to add a third. It also goes without saying that the Libyan
operation will make it harder to make military cuts of any kind. (As a
spokesman for Joe Lieberman put it to Politico, "Congress should be very
careful and cautious about any reductions in defense spending, given the
many
profound responsibilities shouldered by our military at this time.") For a
neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water's edge.

There are several coherent ways to think about federal spending and foreign
policy right now. You can address America's fiscal crisis by calling for
serious cuts both at home and abroad. That's the libertarian path. You can
deny that we're facing a serious fiscal crisis at all, and thus feel free to
support new spending at home and overseas. That's what the pro-war, pro-
bailout liberal hawks have been doing. And you can deny we face a serious
fiscal crisis but join in the libertarians' other arguments against the
wars.
That's the liberal doves' approach.

What you can't coherently claim is that we need to both (a) bring our
financial house in order or face fiscal ruin and (b) embark on one expensive
open-ended military adventure after another. Yet conservatives in the
Kristol
mold don't seem to see a contradiction here at all.

On Thursday, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post led off a blog entry with
fulsome praise for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and a letter he recently wrote
endorsing American intervention in Libya. She contrasted Rubio and his red-
blooded hawkishness with President Obama, who she assured us "would still be
dithering" if it weren't for pressure from "Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron,
Hillary Clinton and a few others." She made it clear that she thinks the
locales that demand our leadership are not limited to Libya. She was
especially scornful of Obama's alleged belief that "we will meet our
obligations" to the world only if "it doesn't cost too much."

And then, in the very same post, she complained that the president's budget
is "devoid of serious measures to steer us back from the brink of fiscal
doom." She's right about that. But she isn't one to talk.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine.

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