Rss@dailykos.com (meteor Blades) · Sunday, February 21, 2016, 12:18 pm
Sen. Ted Cruz strutted out onto the deck of the U.S.S. Yorktown in South Carolina Monday to talk about giving our nation’s bloated war budget a big boost if he becomes president.
As if spending more than the next 14 countries combined isn’t enough.
Added to the strut was the bluster:
“Starting next year our sailors won’t be on their knees with their hands on their heads,” Cruz said, referring to the U.S. sailors who were held in Iranian custody after their [riverine boat] entered that country’s waters. “Our secretary of State will not be apologizing and thanking their Iranian captors. Instead, they will be standing on the decks of the mightiest ships the world has ever known with their heads held high, confident that the great country that they volunteered to serve has their back."
Tough talk. Gunslinger talk.
But there’s no focus in Cruz’s proposal to shovel a bunch more money onto the giant pile that the U.S. Department of Defense already spends, no specific enemy. Just more spending in every category except, Cruz says, the Pentagon bureaucracy—the latter being a common promise of politicians that is never fulfilled.
The Texas senator wants to increase the Air Force to 6,000 planes, lift the number of military personnel to 1.4 million from 1.34 million, and build more battleships as part of growing the Navy to at least 350 ships. His proposal to increase the Pentagon’s budget—including the slush fund known as Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO)—to 4.1 percent of gross domestic product during his first two years in office would raise the 2017 fiscal year budget to $738 billion, a 26 percent increase from what President Obama has proposed. That compares with the peak war budget of $699 billion in 2011.
Cruz doesn’t want to raise taxes to accomplish this—golly, no. Rather, he wants to pay for it by dumping the Internal Revenue Service and four Cabinet-level departments: Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, and Commerce. Great idea, huh? Cruz, by the way, seems to be unaware that the largest single item in the Department of Energy’s $32.5 billion budget for 2017 is the $12.9 billion for nuclear weapons security.
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