A messsage or reason from an unexpected source.

[roninspoon]

“As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking

Comments

[montieth]

And we can't expect to be insular and ignore the world and expect it to go about out business unmolested.

Even Thomas Jefferson figured this out in 1785.

[roninspoon]

I believe there's room for balance between an insular non-interventionist foreign policy and maintaining a global military infrastructure that is bankrupting our nation with an annual expenditure that is nearly as large as the rest of the world's defense budgets combined.

I say that as a military man, from a military family.

[montieth]

Actually, there's a very hard case to make for the Military being the part that's bankrupting the government. In fact, if you look at the spending of the Fed.gov, the biggest grower has been HHS and the Social Security Entitlement side.

Defense has always been a big segment of fed.gov spending because that's it's Raison d'être vis a vis foreign policy. Redistributing money between the states, not so much. Military Spending was 70% of the Federal Government's spending in the 50s. Now it's 20%. Which part has grown again in proportion to the Federal Government's total budget?

[roninspoon]

"Iraq and Afghanistan war costs were also mostly excluded from the budget calculations."

Probably because a large portion of the war financing, hundreds of billions worth, was coming from supplementary budgetary sources not included in the DoD budget.

Here's a graph from the same wikipedia page that yours came from, portraying the increase in total defense expenditures over the last ten years, including supplementary sources.

[realwitchiepoo]

Tell it Ron Paul! Seriously, that guy IS kind of surprising.

[nidea]

Although I may not agree, I do appreciate a logically consistent argument.

[roninspoon]

Rob Paul would be a lot more attractive as a politician if he wasn't an unrealistic anachronism with a penchant for basing policy on religion.