The defense budget for FY2010 is a whopping $533.8 billion. This is without accounting for the price of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which would bring the total to $663.8 billion. The "2009 U.S. defense budget of $660 billion was more than the combined defense expenditures of the next 17 countries. ... And that budget continues to rise steadily, growing at 4.8% for 2010, a year in which the U.S. economy's GDP growth is likely to be less than 2%." As a result, defense spending has accounted 65 percent of the discretionary spending increase since 2001 , making it a major factor in the growth of the U.S. budget deficit since then.
Sen. Johnny Isakson (GA) told a local news station that reducing the deficit "begins with the Department of Defense." The same month, Senator-elect Pat Toomey (PA) criticized Congress for voting for "programs the Pentagon doesn't even want" during a debate with Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA). The week before, Senator-elect Mark Kirk (IL) said that we need "across-the-board" reductions in defense spending. And three weeks ago, Sen. Bob Corker (TN) said on CNBC that defense cuts have to be "on the table" because there's "a lot of waste there." Perhaps the Republican Senate caucus's most outspoken advocate for defense cuts is Tea Party "darling" and Senator-elect Rand Paul (KY), who told PBS's Gwen Ifill that cutting defense spending "has to be on the table." Paul reiterated his call for reducing the military budget this weekend while appearing on ABC's This Week. He tweaked Republicans for "never" saying "they'll cut anything out of military. ... There's still waste in the military budget. You have to make it smaller."
Original Post
