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Monday, May 05, 2008
War Sup Could Fund Several Governments
On Thursday, May 1, the the President officially requested that Congress appropriate $70 billion in supplemental funding to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Combined with the $108 billion in supplemental funding that Congress is currently mulling to fulfill the remainder of Bush's FY 2008 request, contemplated combined spending package would total $178 billion -- by far the world's biggest supplemental spending bill. (This number omits some $20 billion in domestic spending that Congress has, of late, been considering attaching to the supplemental.)
Consider:
(click on image to enlarge)While it's true that a few Senators have called for Iraq reconstruction funds to be doled out as loans rather than direct expenditures, the $3 billion in savings would be but a snowflake in the massing $805 billion snowball known as "war spending." However, by and large, Congress has been exceedingly pliant in writing checks to the Executive.
Clearly sums this large deserve some debate. It was, after all, a $22 billion sliver of daylight between the president's and Congress's FY 2008 budgets that was subject of reams of press statements not so long ago. Curious then that nearly $1 trillion can be shuttled off to the Pentagon, State, VA, and a few foreign governments without any real debate about the merits of such spending or what tradeoffs might be required to accommodate these vast outlays.
UPDATE: Correction -- The wrong state spending data were used on a chart that has since been replaced with the current one. We regret the error.
Posted by Craig Jennings
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