Obama’s Mythical Defense Cuts – 9% higher defense spending
posted by Josiah Garber on April 30, 2009
in Economics, Politics
One of the problems with liberals, as conservatives know, is that no matter how much money they are given to spend, it’s never enough. The social and economic problems they lament are impossible to eradicate entirely, so more spending is always in order. After all, it is bound to do some good. Spending less? Never an option.
But it turns out conservatives are not immune to that impulse. They just apply it to the programs they like instead of the ones liberals like. And their favorite of all is defense spending.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial writers fear that any day, we will be naked unto our enemies. President Obama, they warn, wants to lavish money on everything but the military. America faces an array of threats, and “Obama’s budget isn’t adequate to those challenges.”
Really? Cindy Williams, a defense scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and former assistant director of the Congressional Budget Office, points out that Obama wants to spend 2 percent more in the next fiscal year than President Bush allocated for this year, and 9 percent more than we spent last year.
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