My criticism is not aimed at you. I am just commenting on the criticism coming from people of like mind to you, as opposed to him cutting the budget, and gaining support from people of like mind to Watu. He cannot win this argument because he would gain critics no matter what he did, increase or decrease. And increase or not, it is still a decrease, in that it is not currently keeping up with inflation.
Debt Ceiling
- Thread starter astonmartin708
- Start date
$2T to our debt, not our deficit. Like WATU said war budgets for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars weren’t included as part of the defense budget, they were largely funded through supplementary spending.
www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/afghanistan-iraq-wars-debt-6-trillion-interest/
The cost of the war was always expected by government officials to be long lasting because of the costs incurred in caring for our veterans long term….
Why are we spending so much? Because we have to. Between actually defending the country and supporting our warriors that our leaders sent into harm’s way (wrecklessly, I might add)
The article you referenced arrives at the $6T figure not by supplementary spending but by projected the interest on the $2T out for the next 30 years. There is no adjustment for inflation and the present value of the $6T in todays dollars. Not that all this is terribly important but no one on this board has explained that the $6T figure is actually the cost 30 years from now. Just a clarification point.
Back to the original point, why doesn’t the DOD budget drop in peacetime ? We aren’t paying for overseas deployments at near the same clip and the cost of equipment/weapons should also be less…one would think. You have wanted to decrease defense spending for years. What is your opinion here ?
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Because the costs associated with not being in peacetime weren’t included in their budget, but what was included in their budget was the cost of the healthcare for the soldiers we sent which will continue to rise as they age. The biggest problem isn’t that we ran up a bunch of debt, it’s that we ran up a bunch of debt for absolutely zero benefit and possibly even debt that detrimented us.
Do you have a link to a government website showing actual defense expenditures by year ? My curiosity is peaked
Roads and bridges ARE social spending. So are subsidies for fire trucks and ambulances, clinics and hospitals, power lines and airplanes, food subsidies and home loans
A well educated workforce of service personnel, engineers, technicians, scientists, doctors, etc. etc. has replaced the factory floor and physical labor as the driver of our economic growth. Infrastructure is what supports that development and growth. Roads and bridges as a definition is a century out of date.
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