Doug Bandow: GOP lost in defense budget black hole
Examiner.com
Republicans once claimed to oppose wasteful government spending. But Republicans are now demanding ever more military expenditures, irrespective of need. Presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney all want a major military buildup.
Romney proposes spending “a minimum of 4 percent of GDP on national defense.” Former Sen. Jim Talent and the Heritage Foundation’s Mackenzie Eaglen similarly contend that policy makers “should be judged by whether or not they support spending a minimum of 4 percent of GDP on the regular defense budget.”
Candidate Fred Thompson advocated spending 4.5 percent of GDP on the military. Mike Huckabee would trump everyone by spending 6 percent of GDP on the military: $800 billion, a 50 percent increase in current outlays.
What could possibly justify such huge increases? The economy’s size and growth are unrelated to national security threats. Between 1960 and 2005, real GDP more than quadrupled while the world grew much safer.
In fact, these conservatives sound like liberals on domestic policy: Spend as much money as possible irrespective of need or effectiveness. The U.S. currently spends roughly as much as the rest of the world combined. Nevertheless, Talent talked of “threats that are highly unpredictable and therefore, taken as a whole, more dangerous than the threats we faced during the Cold War.”
(Continued here.)
Republicans once claimed to oppose wasteful government spending. But Republicans are now demanding ever more military expenditures, irrespective of need. Presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney all want a major military buildup.
Romney proposes spending “a minimum of 4 percent of GDP on national defense.” Former Sen. Jim Talent and the Heritage Foundation’s Mackenzie Eaglen similarly contend that policy makers “should be judged by whether or not they support spending a minimum of 4 percent of GDP on the regular defense budget.”
Candidate Fred Thompson advocated spending 4.5 percent of GDP on the military. Mike Huckabee would trump everyone by spending 6 percent of GDP on the military: $800 billion, a 50 percent increase in current outlays.
What could possibly justify such huge increases? The economy’s size and growth are unrelated to national security threats. Between 1960 and 2005, real GDP more than quadrupled while the world grew much safer.
In fact, these conservatives sound like liberals on domestic policy: Spend as much money as possible irrespective of need or effectiveness. The U.S. currently spends roughly as much as the rest of the world combined. Nevertheless, Talent talked of “threats that are highly unpredictable and therefore, taken as a whole, more dangerous than the threats we faced during the Cold War.”
(Continued here.)
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