Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Road to Weimar--The Numbers Game

Everyone with a policy.org is crunching budget numbers and they all claim to be more ACCURATE. You can't see the forest for the numbers. The salient facts are: the US spends more than all other countries combined on war and the military, if you count the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why you would not count those costs is irrational when discussing where national priorities lie. According to the Swedes, the amount spent on defense world wide is about $1 trillion. The Charlatan's latest budget request is $640 billion including the Department of Energy defense related programs. He plans to pay for this outlandish expenditure by cutting civilian programs.

The US spends large amounts of its defense dollars on expensive, high tech weapons systems that are not suited to fighting the kind of low intensity conflicts it gets involved in. How many terrorists toting IEDs can you kill with a new Navy destroyer costing $3 billion each? The Navy wants 12 of those, along with 30 new submarines each costing $2.6 billion each.
The Air Force is no slouch in the fight at the public trough with the most expensive weapon program in history, the Joint Strike Fighter. It will cost $276 billion for 2400 planes. Its new F-22 fleet of 179 planes cost more than $350 million each. The Pentagon said last year 36 of its weapons procurement programs were over budget. The GAO estimates that overruns on some of those programs exceeded $23 billion. Go figure.

No comments: