Alan Grayson, a hero to the left, recently lost his re-election campaign and just finished up his term. He was recently the subject of an interview with the NY Times, the so called paper of record.
While Congressman Grayson gave a very frank and (in my view) on the money assessment of the current state of the democratic party:
“What did the environmentalists see over the last two years?” he asked. “A proposed monumental increase in subsidies for nuclear power industry and offshore drilling.”
As for gay voters, he said: “What they got to see was a judge order that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ no longer be enforced and a Democratic president appeal that decision. That is what that constituency saw before Nov. 2.” (The law was repealed in the final hours of the 111th Congress.)
By Election Day, Democratic voters in many districts felt that they had no real choice, Mr. Grayson said.
“If you want people to support you, then you have to support them,” he said. “You have to think long about what you did for people who voted for you, made phone calls for you, who went door to door for you.”
The line that I found most telling of the interview was this one.
He even gave his legislation provocative names, like the “The War Is Making You Poor Act,” which sought to reduce taxes by requiring the Defense Department to finance the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan within its relatively small annual budget. (It did not pass.)
How Mr. Barbaro and the NY Times editorial staff could of let such an amazing line slip by is beyond me. Not since the
Judith Miller fiasco, has such an outlandish line been printed in the Times. As has been pointed out, we spend about 50% plus on Defense. I did not look, but I wonder if you could find in the NY Times a story on how big Social Security is or maybe all of the money we spend on the department of education…
How telling for the current state of journalism.
I think what he meant was within the Defense Department’s regular budget. As you may know the wars are being funded with “supplemental” funding–that is what the line is referring to.
Did you seriously just source a 2006 Ben & Jerry’s web page for a statistic on defense spending? Dated, and really laughable source aside, that page doesn’t even remotely say what you claim it does anyway. It certainly does not say we “spend about 50% plus on Defense” or anything close to it.
Are you just that lazy – maybe linked the first website google churned out – or are you just being intellectually dishonest?
Locke, yes as they have been pointing out for years that the we spend over half of our budget on defense and no one ever talks about cutting it. If that link did not work for you how about these?
http://seekingalpha.com/article/173962-should-the-u-s-drastically-cut-its-bloated-defense-budget
US defense expenditures have been soaring since the 2001 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2008, the US spent $711B accounting for 48% of the world’s defense expenditures
http://armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/defense_spending_since_2001/
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2009/05/us-defense-spending-in-context/
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm
The point is, with or without links, from any year in recent history, saying our ‘relatively small defense budget” is just not even close to reality.
No, the point is, you are either lazy or a liar. Which is it?
You made a statement “we spend about 50% plus on Defense” and source it with a crappy, dated website that doesn’t even say that. And FWIW – the reason the pie chart in your link has been removed is because it was exposed as the fraud it was years ago by Fact Check.org.
Nope, it’s not remotely true. So as per usual, you move the goal posts…now it’s about the percentage of the world’s defense spending. Probably might actually true. So long as you ignore China. Because heck, 4.3% of their GDP is only a couple of bucks, don’t bother counting it. And North Korea because I’m sure the million and a half people they have in the military don’t cost anything. And a few others. But if you ignore the right countries, then yes, US defense spending is about half of the sum of the remaining ones.
FWIW, if you’re actually interested in worldwide defense spending, the CIA Factbook has a chart of defense spending as a percentage of GDP that’s much more legitimate than your warresistors.org or Thing Progress blog pages.
The irony is, had you said, “The US should cut Defense spending” I’d agree completely. If you actually said, “I can’t believe the NY Times referred to our annual defense budget as relatively small” you could have made a decent point. I think that was what you were going for, but tripped all over yourself & were just completely inaccurate in how you tried to do it.
The CIA Fact Book? HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA!!!!
Stunning retort. Yes the CIA Factbook. It’s really about as close to an authoritative source as you can find for very broad range of general interest information on countries of the world.