Dems All Pork When It Comes to Defending Defense Spending
So it's not just Republican Congress critters who know how to bust the budget when it comes to wasteful and useless defense spending (ain't consensus grand?). From the Wash Post c/o of Instapundit and Alan Vanneman:
It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors—a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts—most were Democrats.
And last July, when the Navy's top brass decided to end production of their newest class of destroyers—in response to 15 classified intelligence reports highlighting their vulnerability to a range of foreign missiles—seven Democratic senators quickly joined four Republicans to demand a reversal. They threatened to cut all funding for surface combat ships in 2009.
Within a month, Gates and the Navy reversed course and endorsed production of a third DDG-1000 destroyer, at a cost of $2.7 billion.
"Too many contractors have been allowed to get away with delay after delay in developing unproven weapon systems," Obama said, attributing $295 billion in cost overruns to "influence peddling" and "a lack of oversight" that produces weapons meant "to make a defense contractor rich" instead of securing the nation.
He did not mention that since 2006, Democratic lawmakers have presided over a 10 percent increase in the Pentagon's budget—it now amounts to 46 percent of the government's total discretionary spending—and have also voted repeatedly to keep funding weapons systems that have had hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns.
Boy, remember when $524 million was a number that seemed shockingly big?
Defense spending as a percentage of total fed outlays here.
