When Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time,” he must have foreseen budget requests such as the one President Bush just sent Congress (“Bush budget splashes red,” News, Feb. 5).
Despite the proposed huge increase in defense spending, the defense expenditures are grossly understated. The defense spending should logically include homeland defense. Hence, the total defense budget will increase from $295 billion in 2000 to $417 billion by 2003, a 41 percent increase. This doesn’t include additional billions of defense-related expenses buried in other lines of the budget, such as foreign aid.
Although we all want a strong defense, it is questionable why we need to spend more today to battle terrorists than we needed to defend against Russia and China at the peak of the Cold War. A strategic change in how we spend defense dollars would make more sense.
But if Americans want to throw money at defense, so be it. The real duplicity in the budget is that Bush is not asking all Americans to make an equal sacrifice for increased security. Rather, by a combination of disproportionate tax cuts for the wealthy, draining the Social Security fund and deficit spending, Bush is surreptitiously placing the burden of increased defense spending on the poor, future retirees and especially those who will have to pay higher taxes in the future to make up the deficits.
It remains to be seen whether Lincoln was overly optimistic when he said, “You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
