defense - Robert Maguire on Diigo

01 Dec 09

Note that this leaves the money we’re talking about spending on universal health care absolutely in the dust.

30 Nov 09

Internal emails expose Boeing-Air Force contract discussions - Wikinews, the free news source

en.wikinews.org/...Air_Force_contract_discussions - Preview

mccain defense spending politics military dod statistics reference

Emails exchanged among United States Air Force officials regarding a USD$23 billion dollar deal with aircraft manufacturer Boeing have been entered into the public record. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) entered them into the Congressional Record during a speech last week against the now-cancelled deal to lease 100 mid-air tanker aircraft from Boeing.

29 Nov 09

How dare you criticize wasteful defense spending! - Salon.com

www.salon.com/...index.html - Preview

US politics dod spending economy budget statistics reference conservatives republicans mccain rumsfeld costs defense

- The 2010 Pentagon budget means "every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on (defense) programs and agencies next year," reports the Cato Institute. "By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China's per capita spending is less than $100."
- "(The Pentagon budget) dwarfs the combined defense budgets of U.S. allies and potential U.S. enemies alike," reports Hearst Newspapers.
- "President (Obama) is on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II," reports National Journal's Government Executive magazine.
- In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.
Sen. John McCain and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After all, they’re the ones who issued those scathing statements about wasteful defense spending in the pop quiz above. That means they’re actually terrorist-appeasing lefties, right?

27 Nov 09

From Dollars To Death Panels: How Republicans Distorted Debates On Capitol Hill | TPMDC

Number Five: Paul Ryan Draws Line On Graph
6 more annotations...
- Number Four: Senate Health Care Bill Will Cost $2.5 Trillion
- Number Three: Republicans Try Math
- cap and trade legislation could cost the average household $3,128 a year. Too bad the author of that study claimed it was all hogwash. That didn't deter leading Republicans, including House Minority Leader John Boehner, from repeating the number over and over again until the day the American Clean Energy and Security Act passed on the House floor.
- Number Two: Inhofe Says Obama 'Gutting Our Military'
- White House's call for a modest increase in defense spending amounted to a "defense spending cut."
- Number One: Death Panels

25 Nov 09

The Globe's Policeman - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...the-globes-policeman.html - Preview

US dod defense military europe politics spending economy economics

We are
not colonists. We have little interest in actually conquering
territory. But we do have an overabundance of faith in the ability of
our military to insure our security and our economic interests across
the globe.
Our military foots the bill for the defense of Europe and
our Asian allies, allowing those countries to spend their own tax
revenues on lavish safety nets and top-notch education programs.
Meanwhile, Americans pay for Leviathan. Or at least the Leviathan with
the guns.
1 more annotations...
- One trillion dollars a year is a lot of money
  that could have gone to innovation in the markets. We can’t have it
  both ways, of course, even though everyone in Washington will tell you
  that we can. Indeed, it is the European governments which are freed
  from this military spending which are spending the most on butter,
  while Americans find themselves more and more mired in debt. You can
  have guns or you can have butter, but you can’t have both.

13 Nov 09

We Can't Cut Spending - Forbes.com

www.forbes.com/...columnists-bruce-bartlett.html - Preview

conservatives spending defense costs doublestandards dod politics US obama republicans reagan medicare healthcare budget deficit statistics reference

Direct presidential control over spending is extremely limited. By law, he must spend every dollar appropriated by Congress. And presidents have no control at all over three-fifths of the budget devoted to interest on the debt and entitlement programs--those like Medicare for which spending is automatic. Even Congress can't reduce spending for entitlements unless it changes the law governing eligibility and programmatic operations. In other words, Congress can't just appropriate less money to Medicare. It doesn't work that way.
Even if the president's party controls Congress by a wide margin--as is the case today--getting agreement even on popular measures, such as expanding health coverage, is very, very difficult, as we are seeing. One reason for this is that the Constitution gives the minority party influence disproportionate to its numbers in the Senate. Thus even though Republicans only have 40 seats, they have been very successful in blocking Obama's health care reform initiative.
10 more annotations...
- At the end of the day, presidents may only propose, Congress must dispose.
- Many of those favoring budget cuts have ridiculous notions about how much of the budget can be cut without reducing services. A recent Gallup poll found that Americans generally believe that 50% of the budget is wasted. This suggests that they believe the federal budget could be cut in half without cutting anything important like Social Security benefits or national defense.
- How tax cuts would help people with no wages because they have no jobs or businesses with no profits to tax was never explained. But many right-wingers are convinced that tax cuts are the only appropriate governmental response no matter what the problem is.
- Looking at last year's budget, only 38% was classified as discretionary; that is, under Congress's control through the appropriations process.
- All the rest was mandatory: entitlements and interest on the debt. Within the discretionary category, 54% went to national defense. Just $37.5 billion, 3.3% of the discretionary budget, went for international affairs including foreign aid. Over the years I have encountered many conservatives who thought that abolishing foreign aid was just about the only thing needed to balance the budget. Obviously, that's nonsense.
- Domestic discretionary spending amounted to $485 billion last year. With a deficit last year of $459 billion, we would have had to abolish virtually every single domestic program to have achieved budget balance.
- That means every penny spent on housing, education, agriculture, highway construction and maintenance, border patrols, air traffic control, the FBI, and every other thing one can think of outside of national defense, Social Security and Medicare.
- Last year, we spent $456 billion on Medicare, and it is the fastest growing major government program. How likely is it that the people protesting Obama's Medicare cuts will stand with Republicans if they propose cutting that program even more to balance the budget?
- The elderly are the reason why we have a national debt.
- When I raised these facts with a prominent Republican recently, he countered that Reagan had cut spending. But he didn't. Spending rose from 21.7% of the gross domestic product in 1980 to 23.5% in 1983 before declining to 21.2% in 1988. And that improvement came about largely because favorable demographics caused entitlement spending to temporarily decline from 11.9% of GDP in 1983 to 10.1% in 1988. (Last year it was 12.5% of GDP.)

12 Nov 09

DefenseLink.mil - Special Report - DoD Goes Green

www.defenselink.mil/...0809_green - Preview

politics US reference statistics dod defense environment climatechange technology green

05 Nov 09

Matthew Yglesias » Reconstruction for the USA

yglesias.thinkprogress.org/...reconstruction-for-the-usa.php - Preview

US politics defense spending statistics reference costs economy china

With that kind of money you could entirely build out a national network of true high-speed rail. One year’s worth of defense spending gets you that
Does anyone doubt that the net benefit of $100 billion spent on high-speed rail is easily higher than that for the last $100 billion spent on defense?
4 more annotations...
- What was the cost, human and economic, of the I-35 bridge collapse? Of the Metro crash and resulting limitations on service? Of the Bay Bridge shutdown? And of course, investments in infrastructure constitute positive contributions to the economy, which ultimately strengthen our ability to direct resources toward defense.
- So the real point would be something like if we took 10 percent of the defense budget and re-allocated that to infrastructure, we could have a national HSR network in ten years. And we’d still be spending over triple what our nearest rival spends.
- I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the quote, but someone told me he heard a Chinese official tell him “over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.” I don’t really think we should view that contrast in a paranoid light, but if you do want to take a paranoid view of the American national security situation it makes a lot more sense to worry about that than to worry that someone in a cave might build a bomb

My friendly Nudge of the day. « Rortybomb

rortybomb.wordpress.com/...my-friendly-nudge-of-the-day - Preview

US politics reference statistics defense dod government taxes nudge

28 Oct 09

Stimson - Publications - A Foreign Affairs Budget for the Future

www.stimson.org/pub.cfm - Preview

diplomacy statedept US politics dod pentagon defense foreignpolicy statistics reference usaid aid sis682

"Our diplomatic leaders - be they in ambassadors' suites or on the State Department's seventh floor - must have the resources and political support needed to fully exercise their statutory responsibilities in leading American foreign policy."
- Defense Secretary Robert Gates, July 2008
Increased diplomatic needs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and "the next" crisis area, as well as global challenges in finance, the environment, terrorism and other areas have not been supported by increased staffing. Those positions that do exist have vacancy rates approaching 15% at our Embasssies and Consulates abroad and at the State Department in Washington, DC. USAID's situation is even more dire. Today, significant portions of the nation's foreign affairs business simply are not accomplished. The work migrates by default to the military that does not have the necessary people and funding but neither sufficent experience or knowledge.
2 more annotations...
- The "militarization" of diplomacy exists and is accelerating.
- This report provides a plan and a process to begin and carry forward the rebuilding of America's foreign affairs capability.

23 Oct 09

Matthew Yglesias » America Spends A Lot on Defense

yglesias.thinkprogress.org/...ca-spends-a-lot-on-defense.php - Preview

US politics reference dod pentagon statistics spending defense

Yesterday, congress appropriated a $680 billion for the Department of Defense in FY 2010.
veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion.
4 more annotations...
- $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.
- every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.
- Preble says that this enormous expenditure “flows directly from our foreign policy.” But it’s worth also saying that our foreign policy flows from the vast scope of our defense spending.
- People are starving in Ethiopia for want of a fraction of the DOD’s daily budget in food aid.

09 Oct 09

National Defense Strategy

74.125.113.132/search - Preview

US politics foreignpolicy defense strategy reference sis689

05 Oct 09

Pentagon auditor deemed serial failure - Washington Times

www.washingtontimes.com/...eaten-to-scrap-defense-auditor - Preview

defense dod politics spending private contractors military war statistics reference

In one case, DCAA officials had attempted an audit of a major U.S. defense contractor doing reconstruction work in Iraq. The contractor was not named in the report, but a person familiar with the investigation told The Washington Times that it was Parsons Corp., a Pasadena, Calif.-based engineering firm whose work in the past has been criticized as shoddy.
The GAO report said the firm did almost $900 million of U.S. government contracting in 2004, the year the audit started, a quarter-billion dollars worth of it in Iraq.
4 more annotations...
- Two years after the DCAA began a review, in 2006, Stuart Bowen, special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, pledged to investigate all of the $1 billion worth of contracting Parsons had done in Iraq, after evidence emerged about unfinished and substandard work. Last year, he released a report charging that the firm had been paid $142 million for canceled reconstruction projects.
- The initial DCAA audit identified eight serious deficiencies in the firms billing system. But after the contractor objected, a supervisor ordered DCAA staff to delete some of the documents the audit had generated and revise others, the GAO found. When the final audit was published, five of the eight deficiencies had been removed altogether and the other three downgraded to suggestions, meaning the firm got a "clean" audit rating.
- That supervisor was subsequently promoted to become the quality assurance manager for the DCAAs Western region, serving as the last line of quality control over thousands of audits every year - including many that ended up being questioned by the GAO - a circumstance Ms. Collins called "devastating" to morale at the agency.
- In the longer term, he said, lawmakers could consider elevating the agency to a "component agency" of the Department of Defense, reporting directly to the Pentagons powerful deputy secretary; or even moving it outside the department altogether, creating an independent audit agency.