BUDGET UPDATE….Is the military budget really going up by 4.8% next year? Of course not. What with the costs of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s going to be a whole bunch more in the supplemental budget submitted later this year.
But Fred Kaplan says there’s more going on than that. The supplemental request this year isn’t just for the legitimate, hard-to-predict cost of the occupations. The administration is also tossing in ordinary, predictable costs that ought to be in the regular budget to begin with.
If they did that, of course, the top line growth number would look more like 9 or 10%, and the top line deficit number would look tens of billions of dollars higher than it does now. That makes for bad headlines.
Smoke and mirrors, folks, smoke and mirrors. The deeper you look, the worse it gets.
