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Thursday, June 15, 2006
After Five Years of War, Spending May Not Be Considered "Emergency"
Picture this, if you will: A hurricane levels your house and you have to move into an apartment while your home is repaired. You are also a reasonable, sane, and mathematically competent homeowner who can budget living expenses appropriately. When you created your budget that year that the hurricane destroyed your home, you (rightfully) did not include in your budget a line-item for mortgage payments and rent. Let’s also imagine that you’ve had problems getting your home repaired due to unexpected problems with your contractor, various building codes, material shortages, etc. In fact, you see no end to these problems and have no plan whatsoever to move out of your apartment.
Would you, after five years of paying rent, fail to include rent expenses as a line item in your Quicken budget? Exactly. No reasonable head-of-household would. My home-ec teacher would’ve flunked me if I didn’t answer ‘No’ to this test question.
Congress, however, is just now coming around to the realization that Iraq and Afghanistan war spending should maybe be included in annual appropriations. The Senate voted yesterday (98-0) to approve Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) amendment to the FY07 defense authorization bill that would allow emergency spending only in the case of unforeseen expenses. And given that President Bush has continuously rejected setting an "arbitrary timetable" for withdrawal from Iraq, one can hardly claim Iraq war expenses as "unforeseen."
Posted by Craig Jennings
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