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Budget
should reflect war based on Bush announced his budget for 2003 this past week. He asked for a lot of money, including increased spending on defense (which should come as no surprise) and decreased spending on pretty much everything else. So what, specifically, was increased in defense? Military personnel, operation and management, procurement (which is the purchase of weapons), research, development, testing and evaluation all had their budgets increased. The proposed 2003 budget would increase a total of $48 billion to the Pentagon. Bush also wants to continue to increase spending each year, hitting a maximum in 2007 of $451 billion. This is a lot of money. In fact, that 2007 number of $451 billion is just shy of Reagan’s 1985 budget adjusted for inflation of $451.8 billion. So Bush wants to spend $451 billion on the military. Why should that come as any surprise, and why should that bother us? One must keep in mind the $451.8 billion spent by Reagan was in the middle of the Cold War. But, if we are entering a new cold war against terrorism, shouldn’t we also need to spend seemingly outrageous amounts of money? Well, no. This war on terrorism is supposed to be our “shadow war.” It is supposed to be a war won by intelligence, not bigger bombs. We were bested by a small group of people with box cutters. The next move by al Qaeda will not be a frontal assault. (A frontal assault will not likely be any move by a terrorist organization ever.) Developing three new fighter planes is therefore unnecessary. So why does this shadow war, an unorthodox war, require so much orthodox military hardware? One of the main arguments for buying new planes is the average age of the F-15s in use is more than 15 years. That means on average the last plane purchased was bought back when Reagan had the biggest defense budget. These planes still work though, don’t they? Although money should be spent on maintenance of weapons, buying planes and ships might not be the best way to spend. This still does not really explain why we aren’t spending more money on intelligence. The CIA’s budget could certainly be increased. With a stronger CIA, we might be able to find out about future terrorist attacks before the planes crash. In any case, how is this all being funded? The accusation is that the military spending is being paid for by taking money from Medicare and Medicaid. The argument is that the White House wants to cover up money shortages by dipping into Social Security and Medicare surpluses. That sounds pretty insidious and somewhat disturbing, doesn’t it? Well, the budgets for Medicare and Medicaid aren’t really cut. Medicare is going to get an additional $6 billion and Medicaid is going to get an additional $15 billion more than they got the past year. Social Security is getting almost $20 billion more. So nothing is really being cut here. Rather, they are just getting a smaller “raise” than they would otherwise get. This is apparently what having your budget cut means. The budget this year stresses national security. I don’t think that comes as a surprise to any of you. National security is important, but perhaps we are buying the wrong toys for this conflict. We are being told this is a war dependent on intelligence, but instead of buying spies, we are buying jets. So the Social Security and Medicare rumor is just a half truth. They have been budgeted less, but they still are getting more money than last year. Finally, we should all keep in mind this budget won’t stand anyway. It has to be argued over for a couple of months before it is ready to go. I guess there’s a reason the budget for 2003 comes out in February 2002. Tony
Gallagher is a columnist for the Daily Illini at the University
of Illinois. |
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TCU Daily Skiff © 2002 |
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