Poor Pat Buchanan. Somehow he got the impression that America’s domestic troubles would mean that we’ll need to rein in the amount we spend on our empire abroad, when in reality all that stuff that we call military “spending” isn’t spending at all:
… the first rule of Washington budgeting is that money spent on the Department of Defense doesn’t actually count as money. I think that’s in the Blue Dog Charter, a poster on the wall in Fred Hiatt’s office, and somewhere in the Declaration of Independence.
See? With that out of the way, it’s clear that we’ve really got nothing to worry about.
P.S. On a serious note, my wife and I watched Why We Fight this past weekend, and it’s really good.
P.P.S. On another serious note, check out how Bob Barr’s spending proposals will impact the federal budget, as compared to John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s (pre-bailout!) ones. Crucially, though, I’m not sure if these numbers were drawn up under the standard misapprehension about the “costs” of defense spending; if they were, the National Taxpayers Union stands corrected.
Filed under: foreign affairs, government/law, taxation, war
I agree with a lot of what Buchanan says on foreign policy, but can’t we find a better spokesperson for conservative anti-imperialism? I mean, the guy was one of Nixon’s biggest enablers, has a history of racial insensitivity, and is evidently one of Sarah Palin’s biggest fans . . .