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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (139548)	10/3/2001 5:21:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1580692

GDP can grow and not necessarily result in a larger budget... And you point is? GDP can grow and not result in a larger budget. A tree can grow and not result in a larger budget as well. I really don't understand where you are comming from on this one. GDP is a measure of the burden of defense spending. If a major non defense budget item is cut the % of the federal budget spent on dfense goes down but it doesn't get harder to pay the amount for defense if anything it is easier. Similarly if a major new non defense budget item is created the % of spending for defense goes down, but the dificulty in maintain that level of spending goes up. If you want to measure how much we spend on defense spending money on other things doesn't effect the figure. Also even by your prefered method defense spending has come down a lot and will continue to go down. It will almost certinly be a lower percentage of the federal budget in ten years even with SDI and new homeland defense spending. Nonetheless, they probably spend a fourth of what we spend on defense. I doubt it. It is much less then that. Doing a little research it seems Israel spends less then I thought. The defense budget is only about 10% of Israel's GDP. However it probably doesn't count for all defense and security spending so you might be talking about something more like 15% maybe even more. The offical defense budget is less then 1/30th of America's. We spend more than enough, so much so the waste is outrageous.......and if you were a true fiscal conservative you would agree. I think the waste is outrageous, as it is in many other areas of government spending. But I don't think that defense spending as such is waste only money that is inefficiently used or not adequately accounted for. BTW - What areas of US military involvement in the world would you cancel in order to have less need for a large military and how much do you think that would save? Should we not deploy to the area around Afghanistan? Should we get out of Kuwait or the Balkans? Should we rescind our promises to help protect our NATO allies and Japan and South Korea. Should we tell Taiwan they are on their own should the communists ever attack? Right now SDI is relatively small and canceling it completely would not cut the budget much. If you want real savings you have to cut the size of our forces. We went from 18 army divisions to 10 divisions. We have less active US navy ships then at any time since the 1930s. We had 594 in 1987, 357 in 1998, 316 in FY2001 and probably under 300 soon. (These number's include non combat ships. Combat ship numbers are probably under 150) The air force has been cut from 24 active wings to 12. Did you think we did not allready take an axe to defense after the end of the cold war? Military spending has been declineing in real terms for over a decade while the pace of operations has increased. I would support closing unneeded bases and that will save money in the long run, but it costs more in short term and runs in to political hurdles when members of congress don't want to cut spending in their district. If spending was still at it's cold war peak then I would agree with you that it should be cut. But when we have half of the active airforce wings and not much more then half of the army divisions and naval combat ships then it has allready been slashed. Tim

To: tejek who wrote (139548)	10/4/2001 9:27:47 AM
From: brian1501	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580692

...We spend more than enough [on defense], so much so the waste is outrageous.......and if you were a true fiscal conservative you would agree. I would agree that there is waste going on with defense, however, as a fiscal conservative, I believe this is a small issue compared to the other wasteful things the government spends our money on. Defense is one of the primary responsibilities of the federal government...it is unlike all of these other things that should not even be touched at the national level, like education, healthcare etc.