Can we afford to cut the defense budget?

[Karmadillo]

As far as I know, Dennis Kucinich is the only Democrat suggesting cutting the defense budget is both reasonable and possible. This proposal tends to be met with a rolling of the eyes and a response that goes something like, "Well, what would you expect from Kucinich?" Well, Kucinich was right on the Patriot Act and he was right on the Iraq War Resolution. Maybe he's right again. Here's an article that goes into some detail how such cuts can be made.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2088277/

The Military's Bloated Budget
It hasn't been this big in 50 years. Here's how to trim the fat.
By Fred Kaplan

This year, if all goes as President Bush plans, the United States will spend more money on the military than in any year since 1952, the peak of the Korean War.

Here are the stark numbers. The original defense budget for fiscal year 2004 was $400 billion. Bush's supplemental request for Iraq and Afghanistan, which he announced last Sunday on television, is $87 billion, for a total of $487 billion. Let's be conservative and deduct the $21 billion of the supplemental that's earmarked for civil reconstruction (even though the Defense Department is running the reconstruction). That leaves $466 billion.

By comparison, in constant 2004 dollars (adjusted for inflation), the U.S. defense budget in 1985, the peak of the Cold War and Ronald Reagan's rearmament, totaled $453 billion. That was $12 billion to $33 billion less than this year's budget (depending on whether you count reconstruction). In 1968, at the peak of the Vietnam War, the budget amounted to $428 billion. That's $38 billion to $59 billion below Bush's request for this year.

You have to go back more than 50 years, when 50,000 Americans were dying in the big muddy of Korea, to find a president spending more money on the military—and even that year's budget, $497 billion in constant dollars, wasn't a lot more than what Bush is asking today.

These are parlous times, but are they that parlous? Do we really need to be spending quite so much money on the military?

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