Saturday, January 08, 2005

More for Rumsfeld not to be happy about

Evidently we're cutting the budgets of advanced weapons systems to fund our current war. That's not really a bad thing, since it's stuff we don't really need to be wasting our money on anyway.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48425-2005Jan4.html

I like this part:

"White House officials last year informed all federal agencies and departments, including the Defense Department, that they would have to contribute to the president's effort to cut the budget deficit in half, as Bush has pledged, according to Chad Kolton, a spokesman for the White House budget office. At the same time, emergency requests for the war in Iraq have steadily escalated in each of the past three years.

'No one had anticipated that the cost of Iraq would continue to grow like [this],' said Dov S. Zakheim, an original member of Rumsfeld's team who retired as Pentagon comptroller last year. Now, he said, 'clearly they are concerned about the deficit on one hand and Iraq on the other.'"

Now they concerned about the deficit and Iraq. Well, I guess better late than never, eh?

2 comments:

adam said...

I thought they had forgotten all about it...

Alexander Wolfe said...

For all of the talk of "crises", it takes a real crisis, like an incredible deficit and a continuing war in Iraq, to force us to finally come up with a reasonable defense budget. The real sign that they're serious is that they're willing to cut $5 billion from the missile defense program; that's how you know that reality has sunk in.