Scamming the Budgetary Process

Why do we keep seeing this? When the Republican Presidential Candidate see us in Iraq for 100 years (it really doesn’t matter what the role is), how can the budget for these operations still be an emergency appropriation?

Not an Emergency – washingtonpost.com
FIVE YEARS into paying for two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s outrageous that so much of the financing continues to be approved outside the normal budget process, through “emergency” spending bills that must be passed, must be passed in a hurry and therefore must risk ending up as vehicles for other initiatives. Some of these are worthy, but they hardly count as “emergencies” that should be exempt from the ordinary give-and-take of budget negotiations or from the rules that require new mandatory spending programs to be paid for in some way.

The emergency was over in 2004…and America blinked.

Gary Boyd

2 thoughts on “Scamming the Budgetary Process

  1. On Fragments from Floyd, I show that this current conflict is our country’s least costly in our history. Between 2-4% of GDP is sustainable for quite a while. Given this, don’t we deserve a President who can give us the best shot at success in defense?

    And you took McCain’s comment completely out of context. Here is the original:

    “a crowd member asked McCain about a Bush statement that troops could stay in Iraq for 50 years.

    “Maybe 100,” McCain replied. “As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, it’s fine with me and I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”

    Senator McCain responded that his statement that U.S. troops could spend “maybe 100” years in Iraq was referring to a military presence similar to what the nation already has in places like Japan, Germany and South Korea. – Source: CNN.com

  2. Actually, I didn’t misquote the good Senator. I came right out and said I didn’t care what our role was in Iraq…

    Pardon the hell out of me though if I don’t find any war sustainable but particularly not the war in Iraq . And looking at a war in the terms of the percentage of the GDP is nothing short of disingenuous. But then again, that matches the reasons we say we started this war…

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