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

To: tejek who wrote (142095)	1/24/2002 11:25:42 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1579772

I think defense should be more then 22.5% of government spending, but not because the government should spend so much on so many other things. Some of those things it shouldn't be spending any money on because they are not constitutionally part of the federal government's responsibility or they simply aren't needed or can be done more efficiently without heavy government involvement. In any case the important figure is not the percentage of government spending (if we cut spending on say corporate welfare our defense spending figures measured by this standard would look higher but they would be the same and they would be easier to deal with) but rather % of GDP. The figure after this increase will just inch up a bit from a level that was the lowest it had been since before WWII. Also if you do want to measure it as a % of government spending it will also be a lower level then it was since atleast that time if not earlier. Furthermore it seems your 22.5% figure is innacurate. First I said "less then 2.5%" not "2.5%" secondly 2001 DOD spending was 15.1% as a percentage of total federal outlays and 9.4% as a percentage of net public spending. defenselink.mil publicagenda.org A $48bil increase makes sense considering that we have been at war. I understand that we came close to running out of certain types of bombs or missiles. We will have to buy those back plus expand our inventory so that we wont run out if we face a slightly tougher enemy. But mainly the increase is needed because Clinton took an Axe to defense spending, which had allready declined under Bush sr, and actually began its decline in real terms during Reagan's second term. If it had not had such a big decline I would probably be with you in opposing any significant increase. This increase will not cause force levels to go up. At most it will maintain them where they are (which is lower then they where for most or all of Clinton's terms, and lower then they where under every other president in my lifetime and even before that). Some more information can be found in the pdf file located at csis.org (direct link is csis.org ) Tim