Cut the Pentagon Budget in Half and We'll Solve One Hell of a Lot of What Ails Us.

Pentagon’s Black Budget Tops $56 Billion

Noah Shachtman and Katie Drummond
WIRED.com

The Defense Department just released its king-sized, $708 billion budget for the next fiscal year. Much of the proposed spending is fairly detailed — noting exactly how many helicopters the Pentagon plans to buy and how many troops it plans on playing. But about $56 billion goes simply to “classified programs,” or to projects known only by their code names, like “Chalk Eagle” and “Link Plumeria.” That’s the Pentagon’s black budget.

Cobbling together this round figure for the military’s hush-hush projects is easier than it seems. The Pentagon’s separate ledgers for operations, research and procurement all contain line items for “classified programs.” Add those to the nonsensically-named programs, and you’ve got yourself an estimate for the Pentagon’s secretive efforts.

Last year, that budget grew to more than $50 billion – ”the largest-ever sum,” according to Aviation Week’s Bill Sweetman, a longtime black-budget seer. A few more billion were added for wartime operations, for a total of $54 billion. This year’total would be $2 billion higher, a 3.7 percent increase.

Not all of the Pentagon’s secret projects got a budget boost, however. Funds for the Cobra Judy missile-watching radar system were cut nearly in half, from $61 million to $36.5 million. Similar, money for the Navy’s Link Evergreen project was cut to $41 million, from $123 million.

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Next, about defense spending– True, Social Security and Medicare are about the same size as the amount we are told is spent upon defense. The difference is that Medicare and Social Security are governmental TRUST funds. They are NOT paid for through income tax. They are supported by direct contributions from those who benefit from them. . Hence, Social Security and Medicare do not belong in the Federal Budget Allocations, whereas Defense spending is an appropriation and is 60+% of our budget.

If our spending was in line with the rest of the world we could easily balance our budget. Just about every country in Europe, for example, spends less that 2% of its GDP on defense. Most are around 1% and the whole European Union together only spends 1.69%. We spend 4.65%. It is this imbalance that makes it easy for the top 1-2% to keep us busy fighting each other, rather than focusing on them, the real cause of the problem.

SOURCE:

http://dailycensored.com/2010/03/30/there-is-a-thing-about-opinions/