Or do I repeat myself. Thank you Ryan, for your very detailed blog post on defense spending and the wonderful graphs you created. What this means is that every dollar sent to the Heritage Foundation is a dollar sent to promote war. It also means that any Republican presidential candidate (official or unofficial), and the more “conservative” the worst, who calls for more defense spending is a bloodthirsty warmonger himself or is willing to pretend that he is to get the votes of bloodthirsty warmongers, no matter what his name. I stand by every word of what I wrote back in 2009: The very heart and soul of conservatism is war. Patriotism, Americanism, and being a real conservative are now equated with support for war, torture, and militarism. 7:31 pm on March 26, 2015
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Time reports that Rand Paul has come out in favor of a sizable boost to defense spending,
[U]nder Paul’s new plan, the Pentagon will see its budget authority swell by $76.5 billion to $696,776,000,000 in fiscal year 2016.[1]
Paul, positioning himself for a run in the presidential primaries, is echoing his fellow republicans who seem to be under the impression that defense spending is an endangered species in Washington, DC.
In fact, in January, the always-hawkish Heritage foundation proposed new increases to the defense budget and claimed that “the state of the U.S. military continues to degrade due to recent spending decisions. The several years of uncertainty in the defense budget, the unprioritized cuts, and the magnitude and pace of the reductions have led to a weaker and smaller force today.”
Any serious look at defense spending, however, reveals that spending is basically on a par with spending levels (in real terms) seen during the height of the Vietnam War and during the Reagan military buildup. To claim that defense spending now is experiencing cuts of a large magnitude is disingenuous and requires quite a few splitting of hairs to come up with the number necessary to make the case.
