Pelosi Hates Our Troops

Or so that will be the headline soon enough...speaking about the "spending freeze" proposed by Obama and his administration Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stated the Pentagon should be included as well.

Huff Post:

"While we all want to support our men and women in uniform... and our national defense and our veterans, I don't think that we should protect military contractors, and I want to make that distinction very clear," Pelosi said at her weekly press conference Thursday.

The government can't minimize wasteful spending without auditing the Pentagon, Pelosi said, citing a 2009 report indicating that top U.S. weapons programs went over budget by some $296 billion.

"I don't support exempting them from the freeze," she said. "So I think there has to be a bifurcation in terms of: we support our military and their families and we want them to have everything they need, but we do not support an entitlement program for overruns on the part of a military contractor."

I agree, my major criticism of most deficit and self-proclaimed budget hawks is their dishonesty about defense spending. If you don't look at every department and give each its straight up and down you are essentially setting the standard that the rules only apply to some. Such exceptions are to the detriment of our financial future as a nation as we have been paying for it with interest and without accountability for the past decade.

Glenn Greenwald:

The facts about America's bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the world combined, and spends roughly six times more than the second-largest spender, China. Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously. That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's. As one "defense" spending watchdog group put it: "The US military budget was almost 29 times as large as the combined spending of the six 'rogue' states (Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria) who spent $14.65 billion."

If the administration was truly serious about a "spending freeze" they wouldn't need an army to find where to start.

I am Frank Chow and I approved this message