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Defense spending
Opinion: Houston, We Have a Spending Problem
By John Merline - AOL NewsIn his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Barack Obama said that a key to "winning the future" is to "make sure we aren't buried under a mountain of debt." "Mountain" doesn't really do justice to how much debt the country has piled up. Right now the federal debt tops $14 trillion. To get a sense of how huge that number is, consider this: If you were to make a stack of 14 trillion $1 bills, it would make two round trips to the moon. The day after the speech, the Congressional Budget Office made it clear in a new report why this mountain exists. In a word: spending. As the chart ...
The State of the Union and the Military: Balancing Defense With Debt
By David Wood - Politics DailyWhen Houston comes to play at San Antonio's AT&T Center next Friday night, seven people jammed in among the 19,000 Spurs and Rockets fans would represent roughly the proportion of the U.S. population fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq: 150,000 troops out of a nation of 308.7 million people, 0.00048 percent. Just as stunning as America's non-participation in its wars is the cost the country is running up in the name of national security: more than $700 billion this year – twice as much as in 2001 and more than the rest of the world combined spends on defense. Related ...
Gates' Big Knife at the Pentagon: Who Wins, Who Loses
By Sharon Weinberger - AOL NewsThe official Pentagon spending request is still weeks away, but some winners and losers are already emerging in the battle for a shrinking portion of the budget pie. Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced major changes to the Pentagon's budget that are expected to rein in future defense spending. "We must come to realize that not every defense program is necessary, not every defense dollar is sacred and well spent, and that more of nearly everything is simply not sustainable," he told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday. Brittany Y. Bateman, U.S. Air Force An ...
Gates Shifts Military Spending: 'Not Every Defense Dollar is Sacred'
By David Wood - Politics DailyA draining war and record-high defense spending financed by borrowing are driving yet another effort to control the military budget. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, citing a "grim financial outlook'' but also the "growing peril of the future,'' Thursday announced minor shifts within the defense budget of about $178 billion over five years. "Not every defense dollar is sacred,'' he told reporters at the Pentagon. But, he warned, "We shrink from our global responsibilities at our peril,'' and he said under the current Obama administration plan, the defense budget will continue to rise ...
Poll: Americans Want Action on the Deficit, but Oppose Most Proposals to Cut It
By Bruce Drake - Politics DailyAmid all the discussion and debate about the deficit and what to do about it, several hard truths keep emerging: an overwhelming majority of Americans believe it is a major problem and almost none of the most widely mentioned proposals to cut the red ink by reducing spending or raising taxes get majority support from the public. Those realities stand out starkly in a new Pew Research Center poll, conducted Dec. 1-5, in which 70 percent of Americans say the deficit is a major problem that must be solved now, but disapprove by a big margin of the deficit commission's plan to get the red ink ...
Clock Winds Down on Democratic Dominance in Congress
By Patricia Murphy - Politics DailyAs members of Congress return to Capitol Hill on Monday for the final leg of the lame-duck session, they do so knowing that the next several weeks represent the last days of dominance for Democrats in Washington for the foreseeable future. Unlike the first two years of the Obama administration, when the president's party wielded huge majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats now face a future without the chairmanships of key committees in the House or the votes in either chamber to pass bills without significant bipartisan support. With their power slipping away, Democrats are now ...
UK Cuts Endanger Special Relationship With US
By Theunis Bates - AOL News
LONDON (Oct. 15) -- Since the end of World War II, Britain has been America's most dependable ally, fighting alongside it in battle zones from Korea to Afghanistan. But leading U.S. officials are now questioning whether that special relationship can survive plans by the country's recession-hit government to brutally slash its military spending. The full extent of the cuts will be set out Tuesday, when British Defence Secretary Liam Fox unveils the conclusions of the four-month Strategic Defence and Security Review. When that review was launched in June, the newly elected Conservative ...
Robert Gates Plans a Last Hurrah to Control Defense Spending Before Retiring
By David Wood - Politics DailyWith his casual announcement that he will retire sometime next year, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has signaled that a "surge'' in his own assault on Pentagon old-think, bureaucracy and inflated budget gimmickry has begun. In the 45 months since he was sworn in as President George W. Bush's second defense secretary, Gates has smiled often and fought briskly to force the Pentagon and its outriders in Congress and the defense industry to live up to the high expectations of the troops in the field and taxpayers at home. That meant, he often said: No business as usual. No meandering ...
Military Health Care Budget a Challenge for Pentagon
By Andrea Stone - AOL NewsNews Analysis WASHINGTON (Aug. 10) -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates' vow to shut a major military command and eliminate thousands of contractor jobs to plug a "gusher of defense spending" will do little to reduce the Pentagon budget but will prove a breeze compared with cutting military health care costs. Military analysts, including several who met privately with Gates this week, said that the uproar from Virginia officials over the closing of the U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) in Norfolk and the firing of defense contractors in the Washington suburbs will pale next to the national ...
Reader Feedback: Unquenchable Defense Spending
By not in system - AOL News(July 22) -- Michael Cohen is on to something here ("America's Unquenchable Defense Spending"). It is no longer just defense spending. It has crossed the line into military programs addiction, which the military and its enablers in Congress engage in, as do all of us, indirectly, who pay taxes. When legislators want to dis the cost of programs that help people live (social services, education, medical assistance, unemployment insurance, etc.), they say "that program will cost $1 trillion over 10 years." Everyone should discuss the military budget the same way. The military budget will cost ...
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