{"id":143296,"date":"2015-02-02T21:46:21","date_gmt":"2015-02-02T21:46:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=143296"},"modified":"2015-02-02T21:46:21","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T21:46:21","slug":"b-billion-military-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/b-billion-military-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"B is for Billion: What Military Cuts?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This week we\u2019ll hear proposals to massively increase military spending in the face of last year\u2019s outcries about \u201cdraconian\u201d cuts to our defense budget and criticism of \u201cout of control\u201d spending on public services. But don\u2019t be fooled by the hyperbole. In fact, our military budget, still at historically unprecedented highs, was cut by <em>less than one percent<\/em>last year. The president\u2019s proposed FY16 budget again preserves our outsized military spending while continuing a long, dangerous trend of underfunding human needs.<\/p>\n<p>I might describe cuts that will displace thousands of children from Head Start programs as ugly, or cuts to low-income families already struggling to survive as brutal. And cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that might send millions of kids to bed hungry could be described as draconian. But the military spending cuts that we\u2019ve had so far are as gentle and easy as cuts come.\u00a0\u00a0A better grasp on how much our government is actually spending on the military might be the first step to an honest debate about our spending priorities.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s hard to follow the money, even for those of us who study the budget process. For example, the original cuts slated for military spending under the Budget Control Act in FY14 amounted to around $56 billion. However, there was a $20.3 billion reduction in cuts through the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2013, then another $20 billion of non-war funding that was requested by the Pentagon, and an additional $10.8 billion from a Congressional war funding account (read slush fund) to cover regular military expenses. The final Pentagon reduction: $3.6 billion.<\/p>\n<p>Is that a big cut? Not to an overall military budget of well over half a trillion dollars annually, a mindboggling amount that represents nearly half of the entire world\u2019s military spending. But the money we spend on the military in the name of security becomes even more astounding when you consider what we\u2019re <em>not<\/em> willing to invest federal dollars in.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.commondreams.org\/views\/2015\/02\/02\/b-billion-what-military-cuts\" target=\"_blank\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This week we\u2019ll hear proposals to massively increase military spending in the face of last year\u2019s outcries about \u201cdraconian\u201d cuts to our defense budget and criticism of \u201cout of control\u201d spending on public services. But don\u2019t be fooled by the hyperbole. In fact, our military budget, still at historically unprecedented highs, was cut by less [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-143296","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}