Sunday, August 20, 2006
Defense and entitlements
One of our fairly constant refrains is that whatever we might think of the Iraq war, it has been historically cheap in both American casualties and dollars spent. Not as cheap as the absurd projections that came out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2002 and early 2003, but cheap against any reasonable benchmark. Our awesome economy has barely broken a sweat financing the wider war that we have been fighting in the last five years.
Now, fiscal conservatives (whether of the left or right) deplore -- rightly, in my view -- the deficits (whether accounted for or not) that the federal government is running, but they are not a function of the Iraq war. Large federal deficits (which are, in fact, 30% below the projections of even a few months ago) are a function of other federal spending and taxation decisions, the impact of which overwhelm defense spending. Will Franklin has an excellent post that, er, graphically illustrates that defense spending remains at close to its lowest levels since the United States picked up where the British left off at the end of World War II. The shocking pattern has been in the growth of social welfare spending for the middle class, the euphamism for which is "entitlements". Complaints about defense spending or the "cost" of the Iraq war are disingenuous, and meant to distract us from the real fiscal outrage.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Mon Aug 21, 02:42:00 PM:
Libs will ignore the context you've provided, and throw out other numbers, such as "We spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined!" Or, how can we fund the military when there X percent of people are below the poverty line?"
That graph speaks volumes to me though, and should get more publicity.
