Has the President Gone on a "Spending Spree"?

What it kills is the economic prospects of hardworking, longsuffering taxpayers who are being screwed by Big Stupid Republican Government.

Go find David Brooks's very recent NYT column (title something like "GOP Can Be Party of Reform and Hope"), which ran in the Houston Chronicle on 1/5, in which he explains that Dubya and Karl Rove are walking the GOP away from conservatism, because Bush "understands" that it can't be the party of Barry Goldwater any more.......(hell, Bush never "not understood" that, because he's never been a Goldwaterite).

But don't go by my characterization of the article. Read it for yourself.

And oh, by the way -- told ya, everybody. Told ya he wasn't a conservative -- "compassionate" or otherwise!

Brooks, besides scribbling for "all the news that fits", is also a senior editor for the Weekly Standard, a citadel of urban neoconservatism (which label is itself a misnomer, because a neocon is a New Dealer with a defense policy).

In fact, if you look at the figures, discretionary defense spending was actually CUT REPEATEDLY by the previous administration from 1993-1999.

Bush 41 started the process during his administration; many of the units he sent to the Persian Gulf for Desert Shield had been scheduled for demobbing and were instead extended for the Gulf War.

After the war, the RIF's and ship decomissionings continued, including the one that put Timothy McVeigh, who wanted only to stay in and go to jump school, on the street. (And we all know how well that personnel decision turned out!)

Everyone likes money. Political walking-around money. Vig money. Republicans like to use it for tax cuts; the GOP-led Congress and Administration repeatedly cut the Army Department's budget in the 1920's, until soldiers were training with wooden rifles, and the Army Air Corps was practicing bombing with flour sacks.

There were other rounds of cuts in the 1950's, when the Air Force budget was the only one expanding -- the Navy shrank, and the Army was cut back. That was during the Eisenhower Administration.

I disagree with what Slick did with DoD's budget during the 90's, particularly since he upped its tempo of operations for Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, but stuck it with a peacetime no-worries budget. I particularly dislike his idea of jacking up reserves and National Guard callups to meet his operational needs in the Balkans (a practice Bush 43 has continued perforce in the face of much greater need), because he was actually imposing a sort of "tax" in the form of a labor levy on the public, rather than paying for standing forces necessary to do the same job.

In short, while I'm thankful you posted the budget numbers, I think they're insufficiently revealing of the actual burden on the economy of Clinton's defense activities, but are instead a sort of put-up job of their own by a clever, snaky budgeteer.

Perhaps you weren't paying attention when war was declared on Spetember 11, 2001, but I can assure you that we certainly noticed the declaration here in Washington. If you feel that foregoing any spending and surrendering the world to Osama bin Laden's boys is your preferred option, please feel free to explain as well how you do plan on defending the national security of the United States.

I noticed, sport. On 9/12/01, I went in on my day off and pulled my retirement papers off my CO's desk. And I realize that knowledge of the Constitution is a bit lax there in Washington, but foreign nationals may commit acts of war but it is the solemn duty of one branch of the national government to request, and another to Declare it.

[As to how I would have handled discretionary defense spending, I would have started by boosting Army manpower by about two corps, going through munition stocks like there was no tomorrow, and made getting pee stains out of linen the second biggest problem from Tripoli to the Philippines. Oh, and the Guard and Reserve biggest current problem would now be shortage of politely worked preprinted rejection letters. Thanks for asking.]

If you had bothered to read the piece (I am serious), you would have noted that it did discuss non-defense discretionary spending. My guess, though, is that you are more concerned with non-defense, non-discretionary spending. "Entitlements" such as Social Security and Medicare fall under this category. See my above post for a quick discussion of that.

And if you hadn't been preoccupied with masking what some have quoted as more like double your figures for discretionary non-defence spending by waving a rather threadbare set of Colors at us, you wouldn't have had the point go over your head that I was giving the embarrassingly anemic defense discretionary spending figures a pass. It is discretionary non-DoD spending that has gone up like it was managed by a drunken sailor under Bush. THAT is the point.

He’s been on a spending spree since about 15 minutes into his term, and it's done nothing but accelerate since then.

Not true of the defense budget. After the inauguration, Bush 43 rebuffed Don Rumsfeld's laundry-list of DoD budget needs (to repair the damage done by Slick) and told him to stand fast -- and then told him to do a $60 billion carve-out for SDI.

That was all pre-9/11.

My guess is that Bush 43 was playing tax-cut politics, and refusing to allow the liberals to use defense requests as a peg on which to hang an attack on reductions in marginal tax rates.

Now that he's got the tax bill, defense requests can rise.

>"It is discretionary non-DoD spending that has gone up like it was managed by a drunken sailor under Bush."

O.K., here you go (from the piece):

"3. All other discretionary spending increased from the previous Administration's final 2001 budget of $331 billion to a whopping $381 billion budgeted for 2004. This difference amounts to approximately $50 billion, or 15%. Over three years.

See the response above for a discussion of the dishonesty of the tactics currently being used to characterize NON-discretionary entitlement spending (Medicare) as somehow overshadowing defense spending.

Please forgive me for my irate tone a few posts back. I didn't mean for it to come out as insulting as it did, but the post I was replying to seemed a little bit like a thinly-veiled attack on the propriety of defending this nation from attack. I think I was mistaken in that initial read, and I apologize.

Tasty Manatees

I must apologize also for the tone of my previous reply. I have developed a rather acute sensitivity over the last few months to the differences I perceive between "moderate" and "conservative" policies as we approach next November. Truth be told, it probably partially stems from my relative naivete to it in the past.

One thing that stuck me as odd, though was the 15% figure. Two days ago I saw that figure given as 31%, and I seem to remember it coming from a rather conservative source.

Rest assured however, I'll not ever be caught proposing a liberal position on defense.

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