Defense Contractors Spend Millions to Overturn Limits on Military Spending

[unhappycamper]

http://time.com/3984453/defense-contractors-lobbying/

Defense Contractors Spend Millions to Overturn Limits on Military Spending
Center for Public Integrity / Alexander Cohen
5:00 AM ET

The Pentagon’s top contractors sent an army of more than 400 lobbyists to Capitol Hill this spring to press their case for increasing the nation’s spending on military hardware, in a massive effort costing tens of millions of dollars of their own funds from April to June alone, according to an analysis of public lobbying data by the Center for Public Integrity.

The contractors are upset in part because most military spending has been capped for the past few years under budget controls meant to rein in government debt. So far, the caps have forced a decline in main defense budgets from about $528.2 billion in fiscal 2011 to $496.1 billion in fiscal 2015, instead of a previously projected increase to roughly $598 billion. Mounting frustration with the caps was evident in the administration’s submission this year of a military budget that exceeded the limits by about $38 billion, followed by moves by both branches of Congress to add even more billions.

The caps remain the law of the land, however, and they won’t go away until Congress votes to lift them. The issue has so far been tangled up in a dispute between the parties over whether to also increase spending on social welfare programs. But several lobbyists said in interviews that they were optimistic that this could finally be the year that lawmakers agree to let defense contractors return to their historic pattern of ever-higher revenue from the federal treasury.

This could explain in part why total lobbying expenditures by the 53 top defense contractors that reported paying for such work in the second quarter of 2015 were more than 25 percent higher than the amount they spent in the same quarter of 2014 — $58.5 million instead of $45.7 million. But not all of the lobbying was related solely to military spending.

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The budget controls of which they speak is sequestration.

Remember when our congresscritters imposed $500 billion from the social services AND $500 billion from the military?



We The People have been coughing up $50 billion dollars a year for two years now.

Our military has ponied up exactly zero sequestration dollars.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Why exactly do we have a

historic pattern of ever-higher revenue from the federal treasury

for defense contractors?

Productivity has supposedly been increasing greatly for decades. Weapons have been getting far more effective.

Yet we still keep paying more? Why aren't we seeing price drops like we do with every other kind of technology over time?