Defense Spending Are There Any Limits?

My Memorial Day Thoughts

The New York Times (05/23/2015): Stupid Pentagon Budget Tricks-- "... the House passed a nearly $612 billion defense authorization bill this month ...The measure passed by the House tries to protect the new Ohio-class nuclear submarines, estimated at $8 billion each, by shifting the funding from the Navy’s regular shipbuilding account to another.

...Under the House bill, the overinvestment in modernizing the country’s nuclear weapons, which is expected to cost $348 billion over the next decade, would continue.

The bill would supply more military equipment than the administration has requested — including the over-budget and technically challenged F-35 jet fighters." According to Wikipedia the F-35's, "Total development costs are estimated at more than US$40 billion (underwritten largely by the United States), while the purchase of an estimated 2,400 planes is expected to cost an additional US$200 billion."

Further according to Wikipedia when it comes to the defense budget, "this does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance, cleanup, and production, which is in the Department of Energy budget, Veterans Affairs, the Treasury Department's payments in pensions to military retirees and widows and their families, interest on debt incurred in past wars, or State Department financing of foreign arms sales and militarily-related development assistance. Neither does it include defense spending that is not military in nature, such as the Department of Homeland Security, counter-terrorism spending by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and intelligence-gathering spending by NASA." Each of them received a huge amount of "supplemental funding" in 2014.

My Thoughts
It should be plain to see when the hidden costs are factored in we easily spend more the $1 trillion on defense related items. Well over one third of the entire 2014 U.S. budget of $3.5 trillion. Which is over a half a trillion more then revenues received.

BTW: When it comes to overspending Social Security is not a factor. Social Security has collected $3 trillion more then it spent from the nearly 13% tax on everyone's incomes. Congress is using those funds to pay for all this nonsense promising to pay back Social Security for the money it borrowed. Each and every American worker is owed this money just like foreign banks, China or anyone they rented money from in advance. Pay up and shut up already!

So this leaves us to talk about our priorities. Is it to build foreign nations, kill people and wreck things in the process or take care of our infrastructure, education and so forth? One will bring us greater prosperity. The other greater enemies.

There's nothing wrong with defending ourselves. However I don't see how my neighbors would learn to love me if I was constantly poking my nose into their business and held a gun to their face. This seems like a lousy way of making friends. People should want to be your friend rather then fear not being one. It doesn't play well one-to-one nor does it when it comes to some other nation's people.

It's not like we haven't been warned..


This warning didn't come from a Democrat but rather a former a five-star general in the United States Army during World War II who as a Republican landed the Presidency in a landslide over Adlai Stevenson(D)-- Dwight_D._Eisenhower. If you check out the link of the positions he took today's' Republicans would have tossed him under the bus.

Dwight wasn't afraid of using the bomb or a good fight, but he was also aware of the consequences when Washington does little else but beat the war drums constantly for the war industry.

Hence why on this "Memorial Day"...
We remember not only the sacrifices made by our soldiers past but avoid unnecessary sacrifices they may be asked to make in the future if our battles aren't chosen wisely. If anyone truly cares about our military members no one should ask of them or their families to risk everything unless the cost is truly worth the risk. Think about that next time we hear one of these candidates shooting off their mouths.

Additional Reading
Overseas Contingency Operations: The Pentagon Slush Fund