The most bloated budget

If one good thing can come out of the recent financial crisis, it’s that people are beginning to realize just how much our government can spend – we can’t just keep printing off dollar bills.

Talk is going on about where the United States can afford to cut back. Although it’s never a popular stance in this belligerent country, maybe we ought to look at our bloated military budget.

Earlier this year, President Bush announced a military budget of more than $600 billion (not counting costs going toward Iraq and Afghanistan). The proposed military budget represents 58 cents of every dollar spent on discretionary programs.

“That means the U.S. budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars than at any point since WWII, and yet the Army has fewer combat brigades at any point since; the Navy has fewer combat ships, and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft,” wrote Chalmers Johnson.

A combination of cost-overruns, unnecessary programs and extensive military bases around the world, despite no longer needing them, have all helped contribute to the U.S. spending more for defense than all other nations combined.

The Pentagon has refused to tell the American public how it spends the hundreds of billions of dollars appropriated to it each year, mainly because it doesn’t know how to keep track of it all. But also because it doesn’t want to admit that it doesn’t know how to keep track of it all.

Even Bush’s own Office of Management and Budget called the Pentagon one of the worst managed federal agencies.

Most of these government contracts have been issued without much competition, resulting in not even one major system being delivered on cost.

Yet we constantly tell ourselves we love our free market and free enterprise here in the U.S.

And then, of course, we’re also spending on unnecessary programs like the 60-year-old missile defense system. The Pentagon has requested another $62.5 billion for the program for the next five years.

We’ve been spending billions on an effective missile defense system for decades now, always for the wars of the future. Meanwhile, we aren’t even prepared for the wars we’re fighting now – less than $15 billion over five years was spent on countering IEDs despite them being the No. 1 killer in Iraq.

There was a justification during the Cold War to fund this program, but since the USSR’s collapse, there is no threat. Not a single member of “The Axis of Evil” poses a potential threat.

And yet, even if there were a threat from Iran, the Pentagon has said it can’t handle it.

The missile defense systems still aren’t effective under highly controlled tests, not to mention its complete ineffectiveness for countermeasures or decoys.

Iran’s strategy to defeat such a system would be to simply overwhelm it. One could argue, then, by building these U.S. defense systems in Europe, we antagonize Iran into militarizing.

And just so I can piss off as many people as possible, let me finish by pointing out that both Obama and McCain want to increase military spending.