US Diary: are we out of our fucking minds? Check how much more the Pentagon will get out of Bush's budget compared to everything else

Does the US Budget Reflect the Best Investments for Our Future?
The Pentagon would receive $481 billion, and that's not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By Ben Cohen/San Francisco Chronicle

When Congress debates how much to spend on programs such as "education" and the "environment," lawmakers are really deciding how to carve up America's discretionary budget pie, as proposed by President Bush on Monday. The Pentagon would receive $481 billion, and that's not including funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. As you can see, more than half of the money Congress votes to spend this year would go to the Pentagon, leaving budget scraps for everything else.

President Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of defense, Lawrence Korb, argues that about $60 billion of the $481 billion Pentagon budget (12 percent) would be wasted on obsolete Cold War weapons such as nuclear missiles targeting the former Soviet Union, and those weapons can be junked without hurting our ability to fight terrorists.

This $60 billion could be used to do great things for our country. The Common Sense Budget Act, introduced last year by U.S. Reps. Lynn Woolsey, D-Petaluma, and Barbara Lee, D-Oakland, would recover the wasted $60 billion and invest it in, among other things, giving health insurance to the 9 million American kids who lack it, rebuilding and modernizing our nation's public schools and cutting America's oil use in half.

This small adjustment in discretionary spending would be more in keeping with the priorities of the American people who, repeated polling shows, support transferring funds wasted by the Pentagon to programs they care about - such as children and the environment. You'd think this reallocation of spending would be a no-brainer for our political leaders. Not so. The military-industrial complex's manipulation of jobs and political contributions has left even some of our most responsible political leaders paralyzed. So, despite bipartisan agreement that tens of billions of dollars are wasted annually by the Pentagon, nothing is done.

Our lawmakers need to stand up to defense contractor lobbyists and straighten out America's mixed up budget priorities.

Discretionary Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2008 in billions of dollars

$481.4 billion Defense

$58.6 Education

$52.3 Health

$43.6 Justice

$39.6 Veterans benefits

$39.5 Int'l affairs

$32.9 Housing assistance

$28.7 Natural resources and environment

$27.3 Science and space

$23.4 Transportation

$17.6 Training, employment and social services

$17.6 General government

$16.4 Other income security

$10.7 Economic development

$10.1 Social Security and medicare

$5.8 Agriculture

$4.2 Energy

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Source: Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.