Proposed Military Budget Increased, Not Decreased
It has been impossible to miss the story of how furious members of Congress are that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has “slashed” the Pentagon’s budget. If you didn’t actually look at the budget, but just relied upon the stories told by corporate journalists, whose parent companies often have a hand in military contracting, you would think that Gates had proposed a massive decrease in the military budget.
The truth is that the military budget proposed by Robert Gates for 2010 is an increase from the 2009 budget.
2009 Pentagon budget: $513 billion
Proposed 2010 Pentagon budget: $534 billion
How is an increase of $31 billion in the Pentagon budget categorized as “slashing”?
The truth of the increase in military spending is even worse than these numbers suggest. It’s a comparison between an actual budget and a proposed budget. It is typical for Congress to shove even more spending into the Pentagon budget than what the military has requested. So, by the time this process is done, and we see an actual 2010 budget, the increase in military spending will be much, much larger than $31 billion…
… unless American citizens call their members of Congress and demand that real cuts in military spending take place.
[...] comparing these two numbers is like comparing apples to apple blossoms. The 513 billion dollar budget for 2009, after all, is a final budget, passed by Congress after [...]