[MNJohnnie]

False choice.

We can fund both by simply yanking out of the Defense bills all not germane items. The Defense bill should be about defense, not the dumping ground for everything senior congresscritters want funded which can not stand up to a vote on their own.

[tet68]

Buttery guns, what’s not to like?

[El Gato]

It's a false choice all right, because the defense budget is not the largest part of the federal budget. Entitlements are. There is no constitutional authority for the vast majority of entitlement programs. Eliminate all those for which no such authority exists, and there will be enough resources for the guns, including the aircraft carriers and the fighter aircraft, and for the troops.

In 1968 total federal outlays were 20.5% of GDP. Defense was 9.5% while entitlements were 6.9%.

Entitlements first exceeded the defense spending in 1971, the the numbers wer 19.5%, 8.1% and 7.3%.

In 2009, total outlays were 24.7% of GDP, a post WW-II high, with entitlements at 16.1% and defense at 4.6%

Even at the end of the Clinton era, 2000, the numbers were 18.2%, 10.5% and 3.0%.

If you took out that portion of the defense budget spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and did not spend the "savings" on entitlements, then the DoD portion in 2009 would have been about 3.6%, and was only that high because the GDP growth was anemic in 2009.

I don't have the 2010 numbers but I suspect the entitlements and total outlays will be an even larger fraction of GDP than in 2009. In constant FY11 dollars the total defense outlays for 2010 were scheduled to shrink from $683B to $669B, then to rise a little to $708B in FY 11 then drop dramacticall to $608B in FY12, as O cashes in on the peace dividend obtained from pulling out of both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Entitlements, and messing with the economy, are the problem, not the cost of either guns or troops.