You can be sure that we have a bloated military budget that will eventually bankrupt the country when the government presents a year-over-year increase of $654 billion to $680 billion as a great victory in spending cuts. (Can these people not do simple math???)

[A]s the president signed a $680 billion military policy bill on Wednesday, it was clear that he had succeeded in paring back nearly all of the programs and setting a tone of greater restraint than the Pentagon had seen in many years. Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses. White House officials say Mr. Obama took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades. [Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff] said in an interview, that success "reverberated down" to help sustain billions of dollars of cuts in Army modernization, missile defense and other programs. The act authorizes $550 billion for the Pentagon’s base budget in fiscal 2010 and $130 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That compares to a total of $654 billion for both accounts in fiscal 2009. Source: "Victory for Obama Over Military Lobby" By CHRISTOPHER DREW - NY Times - October 28, 2009

Source: NY Times - 7/23/10

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