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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (103365)	2/8/2009 4:55:13 AM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542020

>>You are right that the percentage increase in defense was larger than in non-defense. My point was that most of the increased spending went to other areas. Even if Obama and the new congress shared the same spending priorities as the Republicans who preceded them, that trend would continue, even accelerate, as Iraq winds down, defense hits some limits, entitlements continue to grow at a good clip, and the stimulus and bailout money starts to take effect. The TARP bailout bill wasn't in Bush's initial budget, so you could probably add another $350bil or more to the non defense side (of course because of the large base of non-defense spending, that still leaves you with a bigger percentage increase on the defense side)<< Tim - I think you also have to consider that a large part of the costs of the Iraq war show up on the non-defense side. I'm talking about things like medical and other types of care for veterans. Unless I'm very much mistaken, those costs are not included in the defense budget, nor are they included in the supplemental spending bills for the war. >>IMO, that could more reasonably be phrased as "given that Bush and the (somewhat) Republican-controlled congress where fully aware of the tax cuts, I'd say it was damned irresponsible of them to increase spending the way they did. But really it doesn't even depend on the tax cuts. Whatever they did with taxes it still would have been irresponsible to increase spending that much.<< What's truly irresponsible is to do both at the same time. If you're going to increase spending, you really should do something about coming up with the money. - Allen