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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWilliam D. Hartung at TomDispatch writesHow the Pentagon devours the budget:
Tomgram: William Hartung, The Pentagon Budget as Corporate Welfare for Weapons Makers
Posted by William Hartung at 7:37am, February 27, 2018.
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[...] The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trumps budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year. Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon's own expansive expectations. According to Donald Trump, admittedly not the most reliable source in all cases, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly said, Wow, I cant believe we got everything we wanteda rare admission from the head of an organization whose only response to virtually any budget proposal is to ask for more.
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The public reaction to such staggering Pentagon budget hikes was muted, to put it mildly. Unlike last years tax giveaway to the rich, throwing near-record amounts of tax dollars at the Department of Defense generated no visible public outrage. Yet those tax cuts and Pentagon increases are closely related. The Trump administrations pairing of the two mimics the failed approach of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980sonly more so. Its a phenomenon Ive termed Reaganomics on steroids. Reagans approach yielded oceans of red ink and a severe weakening of the social safety net. It also provoked such a strong pushback that he later backtracked by raising taxes and set the stage for sharp reductions in nuclear weapons.
Donald Trumps retrograde policies on immigration, womens rights, racial justice, LGBT rights, and economic inequality have spawned an impressive and growing resistance. It remains to be seen whether his generous treatment of the Pentagon at the expense of basic human needs will spur a similar backlash.
Of course, its hard to even get a bead on whats being lavished on the Pentagon when much of the media coverage failed to drive home just how enormous these sums actually are. A rare exception was an Associated Press story headlined Congress, Trump Give the Pentagon a Budget the Likes of Which It Has Never Seen. This was certainly far closer to the truth than claims like that of Mackenzie Eaglen of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which over the years has housed such uber-hawks as Dick Cheney and John Bolton. She described the new budget as a modest year-on-year increase. If thats the case, one shudders to think what an immodest increase might look like.
So lets look at the money.
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Though the Pentagons budget was already through the roof, it will get an extra $165 billion over the next two years, thanks to the congressional budget deal reached earlier this month. To put that figure in context, it was tens of billions of dollars more than Donald Trump had asked for last spring to rebuild the U.S. military (as he put it). It even exceeded the figures, already higher than Trumps, Congress had agreed to last December. It brings total spending on the Pentagon and related programs for nuclear weapons to levels higher than those reached during the Korean and Vietnam wars in the 1950s and 1960s, or even at the height of Ronald Reagans vaunted military buildup of the 1980s. Only in two years of Barack Obamas presidency, when there were roughly 150,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about seven times current levels of personnel deployed there, was spending higher.
Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy put the new Pentagon budget numbers in perspective when he pointed out that just the approximately $80 billion annual increase in the departments top line between 2017 and 2019 will be double the current budget of the State Department; higher than the gross domestic products of more than 100 countries; and larger than the entire military budget of any country in the world, except Chinas. [...]
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MORE:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176391/tomgram%3A_william_hartung%2C_the_pentagon_budget_as_corporate_welfare_for_weapons_makers/#more
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/2/27/1745366/-Open-thread-for-night-owls-Hartung-How-the-Pentagon-devours-the-budget