{"id":645232,"date":"2010-01-27T12:17:12","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T17:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"tag:http:\/\/www.economist.com,2009:21004515"},"modified":"2010-01-27T12:17:12","modified_gmt":"2010-01-27T17:17:12","slug":"the-folly-of-ignoring-security-spending","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/645232","title":{"rendered":"The folly of ignoring “security” spending"},"content":{"rendered":"

TO FOLLOW up a bit on yesterday’s complaint<\/a> about the exemption of discretionary “security” spending from the president’s proposed spending freeze, on the grounds that every last dollar spent at Defence, State, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs is apparently necessary to prevent attacks on Americans, have a look at this chart, courtesy of Spencer Ackerman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"As you can see, America is spending nearly $20 billion per year, or a little less than the estimated savings from the president’s spending freeze, on procurement of combat aircraft. Those would be the fancy jets that America would deploy in a conventional war against a fellow superpower. Considering that America’s existing stock of combat aircraft is overwhelmingly dominant relative to any potential adversary’s air force, this seems like the kind of category of spending that might fruitfully be frozen, or hey, dialed back to 2000 levels.<\/p>\n

Roughly half of all discretionary spending (which is itself about 40% of the total budget) is defence spending. It’s ridiculous to perpetuate the false idea that the whole of that budget is necessary and must keep growing<\/em> in order to keep Americans safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TO FOLLOW up a bit on yesterday’s complaint about the exemption of discretionary “security” spending from the president’s proposed spending freeze, on the grounds that every last dollar spent at Defence, State, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs is apparently necessary to prevent attacks on Americans, have a look at this chart, courtesy of Spencer Ackerman. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2918,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4821],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-645232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NivD-2HQY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2918"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}