Politico reports that the Senate passed a $625.6 billion Pentagon budget Tuesday, ending a debate that lasted--get this-- a week! The Pentagon got what it wanted by a 93-7 vote and few if any Blue Dogs or conservatives objected to the cost. Note too that such annual Defense Department budgets do NOT include supplemental funding (which was about $106 billion passed recently) and do NOT include secret, or "Black Budget" costs hidden for intelligence reasons. How these figures mount is shown by last year's budget. For 2009, the base budget of the Department of Defense was $518.3 billion. But adding emergency discretionary, supplemental and stimulus spending brought the sum to $651.2 billion. Defense-related expenditures outside the DoD, according to Wikipedia, constituted between $274 billion and $493 billion in additional spending, bringing the total for defense spending last year to $925 billion-$1.14 trillion. This year's budget will be higher especially if we escalate in Afghanistan. President Obama said for each new 1,000 troops sent to Afghanistan, it would cost another $1 billion a year. So sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan (as Gen. McCrystal wants) would constitute almost half the cost of the annual health care bill!
Contrast the speed with which the Senate acted on the Defense Budget with the way it has wrangled over health care reform (or is it "insurance reform" now?) for months just in Max Baucus's miserable committee. Remember the passage deadline of August that Obama proposed months ago? Remember too that although we do not yet know the total cost of the health care package (since we do not yet know its contents) its annual cost is minor compared to what the Pentagon burns up in a year. The health care package is expected to cost about $900 billion FOR TEN YEARS. So its cost really is about $90 billion a year compared to something like $800 billion-$1.4 trillion a year for the Defense Department (depending on whether you count supplementals and separate budgets for the wars overseas).
Why is it, by the way, that the cost of the healthcare reform package is being talked of in a ten year block of time? I've never seen this done before. I think the reason is pretty obvious: that number of $900 billion looks awfully high except when you realize it is for 10 years (especially when the mainstream media often neglects to point this out). What if we talked about the Defense Department budget in the same terms: the figure would be $9-14 trillion dollars (depending on whether the supplementals, extra war costs, "Black Budgets" are included).
The sad truth is that politicians who are eager to rush into the fray with the call of "cut fat from the bloated budget" are budget hawks only when it comes to social programs for average Amerians' needs and seldom, if ever, when it comes to the Defense Department. Do we still need military bases in Japan 65 years after WWII ended? Do we still need military bases in Germany? Do we still need military bases in the U.K.? Couldn't we--in these budget-strapped times--put off spending on some big ticket military requests and spend that money instead on increased unemployment benefits, training programs for the jobless, hospitals, schools, and food for the poor? As one poster, Dkmich, has written below:
"Politicians always support and have money for wars, bombs, and jails. They never have money for health care, education, or the environment."
The President perhaps unintentionally misled the nation when he told Congress in his address of September 10th that health care was the most costly item to the government. "Put simply," Obama told the nation, "our health care problem is our deficit problem. Nothing else even comes close." Sorry but that's wrong, really wrong factually. It ignores the huge tax breaks given by every President since Reagan to the wealthy and the contribution of such tax breaks to the budget deficit. It ignores the war budgets of the past decades. It ignores the fact that our military budget for this year alone will be approximately 10-15 times the size of the health care reform bill that the administration envisions. And that is why, I think, the cost of the health care reform program is being calculated in a 10 year block rather than in the usual annual way. That too is being done to mislead.
Wouldn't it be nice if our Congress critters started to act as swiftly on human needs like health care reform as they do on bullets and bombs? Perhaps actions such as this explain why today's Gallup Poll shows that Congress's approval rating is down 10% from last month and rests at a figure even below George W's worst numbers. Public approval of Congress is at a mere 21%.
The bloated Defense Department budget raises another question: how will record spending on "guns" affect "butter" (social and reform programs)? Or to put it another way, the historian Robert Dallek, a keen observer of the effect of war on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations has written, "In my judgment, war kills off great reform movements." Thus, the American entrance into WWI killed off the progressive movement. WWII stifled the reforms of FDR and began the development of the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower later warned of. The Vietnam War ended much of the reform under Johnson and with money only for guns and not butter, halted the War on Poverty. It appears that any major escalation of the war in Afghanistan could similarly affect social programs and reform today. As Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. has recently written, "Those most eager for a bigger war have little interest in Obama's quest for domestic reform." Let's hope that President Obama factors this into his decision on Afghanistan and goes with butter over guns.
NOTE: The themes developed in the last paragraph are discussed in greater detail in a diary of mine over at Firedoglake: http://seminal.firedoglake.com/... It also has the links for quotations from Dallek and Dionne.
UPDATE #1: Sen. Healthcare Reform Bill Pegged at $829 Billion.
A poster below questioned my math when I said that the estimated cost for an escalation of troops of 40,000 in Afghanistan would amount to almost half of the cost of the Senate healthcare reform bill.
Here's the math: Obama himself said each new 1,000 troops in Afghanistan would cost an additional $1 billion. So 40,000 troops would cost $40 billion (40 x 1 billion). The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office today set the Senate healthcare reform bill cost at $829 billion. Source:
http://www.reuters.com/...
Since that is for 10 years, the annual cost is $82.9 billion. Half of $82.9 billion is $41.45 billion so the $40 billion for troop escalation is almost exactly the same (especially when you consider that all Presidents have routinely underestimated military costs of wars). Remember Bush's $30 billion for Iraq which Nobel Prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz tells us actually cost $3 trillion?
SOURCES:
- for last year's Defense Department budget and supplementals:
http://en.wikipedia.org/... (relying on figures from Congressional Research Service)
- http://www.politico.com/...
- For Obama speech:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
- For Gallup Poll on Congress:
http://www.gallup.com/...
The same source indicates that "Approval of Congress today is significantly below the average 36% rating found across the past two decades." Such a large drop in approval largely came from disappointment from Democrats: "The current drop in overall job approval to 21% particularly reflects a substantial drop in approval among Democrats, whose 36% rating this month is 18 points lower than last month's 54%, and the lowest since January of this year. ...Of note is the steep decline in approval among Democrats, who appear to be souring on the job Congress is doing despite the fact that their party controls both the House and the Senate."