Trump's Defense Spending Is Out of Control, and Poised to Get Worse

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

A bipartisan commission has determined that President Trump’s recent record defense bill is insufficiently massive to keep America safe, and we should spend more, while cutting “entitlements.”

The National Defense Strategy Commission concluded the Department of Defense was too focused on “efficiency” and needed to accept “greater cost and risk” to search for “leap-ahead technologies” to help the U.S. maintain superiority.

The panel added that Defense is “not where most of the money is.” It said Congress should be focused on “domestic entitlement programs” and “interest payments on the national debt” as sources of savings.

The report even contains a graph that shows defense spending crawling sadly along the floor of the spending X-axis as mighty mandatory “entitlements” soar to great heights.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trump-defense-spending-757028/

That'll go over like a lead balloon.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Save the Entitlements and repeal the Tax Cuts.

[TwistOneUp]

2. I've heard it said ...

If you want to BS someone, draw a graph.

We spent almost 40bbn on the F-35, and it still does not work right. Defense spending is crawling - yeah, if you use a logarithmic scale on the Y axis! lol

[RockRaven]

3. Based on the headline I was rather hoping this was going to be about his attorneys' fees.

Oh well...

[cos dem]

4. What they don't tell you is it is by far the largest portion of "discretionary spending".

SS has its own revenue stream, and is forbidden by law from running a deficit.
Medicare is somewhat of an issue, but is also a highly important program.
Medicaid is not really that large, by comparison.
Debt payments are not optional, since our whole economy is stabilized by confidence in the dollar. If we default, investors will invest in places like China, Russia, India, etc. Why not, if they're not any more risk than the US?

https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-budget-101/spending/

[Pope George Ringo II]

5. It's not that I'm inherently against defense spending

It's that I think that the resources you give the military should be in line with what you ask of it. Some things need absurdly long lead times--like new aircraft carriers, or new tank/plane designs--and you just have to do those every so often like it or not.

I do have some suggestions for asking less of the military, though, like in active operations. And then maybe their budget could shrink a little bit with no real long-term consequences. Whatever you may say about the size of the budget, the frank truth is we've been asking more of those men and women in uniform than we should have. That needs to change.

[USALiberal]

6. Spend the defense money on real infrastructure programs. nt

[Turbineguy]

7. The entire poplulation needs to be Pentagon trained.

Nobody would complain about $500 Big Macs or $250,000 per week rent for a studio apartment in Barstow.