Cutting Through the Rhetoric on Defense Sequestration
By Veronique de Rugy, Benjamin H. Friedman | 06 Jan 2012
The prospect of $500 billion in cuts to the U.S. defense budget from 2013-2021 has Washington in a panic. In unveiling a barely updated military strategy yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta repeated his warning that such cuts would lead to a “demoralized and hollow force.” One of his deputies has called the cuts the equivalent of “self-castration.” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina recently warned that the cuts will “destroy” the Department of Defense.
Sequester: Isolate or hide away (someone or something)
Hiding away?
Wasn't that what George W. Bush was doing with the actual cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq?
Obama: No More War Spending Tricks
By Nathan Hodge
February 25, 2009 | 7:00 am |
In his address last night on the economic crisis, President Barack Obama made it official: No more budgetary sleight-of-hand at the Pentagon.
As we have noted here before, the U.S. military has largely paid for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through emergency spending measures, in effect keeping wartime costs off the books. In addition to masking skyrocketing budget growth at the Department of Defense, this process has allowed the services to treat budget supplementals as a piggy bank for new procurement. Members of Congress may have grumbled about poor oversight, but they have largely acquiesced.
Obama’s message? Not anymore.
GWB spent U.S. tax money like a drunken sailor, plunging us deeper and deeper into debt, while at the same time playing a shell game with the costs:
Editorial: Off-budget accounting for Iraq
By refusing to estimate the costs for the war in Iraq, Bush makes his budget deficits look much smaller than they actually are.
With two full years of experience waging war in Iraq, President George W. Bush should have some idea of how much it will cost to continue the fight next year.
But when he submitted his 2006 budget to Congress in February, it didn't contain one penny for combat in Iraq or Afghanistan. Sunny optimist that he is, Bush wasn't operating on the assumption that the mission would actually be accomplished by then.
Instead, Bush insisted it would be impossible to know how much would be needed, so instead of including anything in the regular budget, he plans to continue the tradition of coming to Congress for emergency supplemental appropriations when war funds get low.
So what, exactly, does
Defense Sequestration mean?
Does it have something to do with a sharp knife?