{"id":237822,"date":"2010-01-27T12:17:12","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T17:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"tag:http:\/\/www.economist.com,2009:21004515"},"modified":"2010-01-27T12:17:12","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T17:17:12","slug":"the-folly-of-ignoring-security-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/237822","title":{"rendered":"The folly of ignoring &#8220;security&#8221; spending"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>TO FOLLOW up a bit on yesterday&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/blogs\/freeexchange\/2010\/01\/dont_mention_war_spending\">complaint<\/a> about the exemption of discretionary &#8220;security&#8221; spending from the president&#8217;s proposed spending freeze, on the grounds that every last dollar spent at Defence, State, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs is apparently necessary to prevent attacks on Americans, have a look at this chart, courtesy of <a href=\"http:\/\/attackerman.firedoglake.com\/2010\/01\/26\/your-insane-defense-budget-presented-in-a-single-chart\/\">Spencer Ackerman<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"mceItem\" src=\"http:\/\/www.economist.com\/sites\/default\/files\/images\/blogs\/2010w04\/aircraft.JPG\" alt=\"\" width=\"313\" height=\"264\" align=\"right\" \/>As you can see, America is spending nearly $20 billion per year, or a little less than the estimated savings from the president&#8217;s spending freeze, on procurement of combat aircraft. Those would be the fancy jets that America would deploy in a conventional war against a fellow superpower. Considering that America&#8217;s existing stock of combat aircraft is overwhelmingly dominant relative to any potential adversary&#8217;s air force, this seems like the kind of category of spending that might fruitfully be frozen, or hey, dialed back to 2000 levels.<\/p>\n<p>Roughly half of all discretionary spending (which is itself about 40% of the total budget) is defence spending. It&#8217;s ridiculous to perpetuate the false idea that the whole of that budget is necessary and must <em>keep growing<\/em> in order to keep Americans safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TO FOLLOW up a bit on yesterday&#8217;s complaint about the exemption of discretionary &#8220;security&#8221; spending from the president&#8217;s proposed spending freeze, on the grounds that every last dollar spent at Defence, State, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs is apparently necessary to prevent attacks on Americans, have a look at this chart, courtesy of Spencer Ackerman. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}