No, the main reason why is because it's not the main motive.
Utterly untrue, as the trillions in unaccounted spending attest to, as well as the simple fact that what is spent usually goes beyond what is allocated. Hence, deficits.
That hoary old nonsense? Look, failing to properly account down to the last penny for how money is spent
within the defense budget is a different beast to how much is appropriated for the defense budget in the first place.
It's also a different beast to the issue of what the defense budget consists of. There are just shy of 1.5 million personnel in the US armed forces, all of whom have to be paid. You cannot cut their salaries in order to fund extra weapons. Their payscales are pretty widely known. So the aggregate figures about how much for personnel and how much for procurement are going to be accurate. What the hoary old nonsense about 'unaccounted' trillions was really about was integrating disparate financial management systems covering the different categories.
It also doesn't allow for the possibility of 'hidden' defense procurements of major armaments - which is what is being discussed - since the defense contractors are inevitably pretty open about the orders they receive, and have to publish accounts. Boeing's books are probably better than the Pentagon's books because Boeing is a publicly traded corporation. The Pentagon is not.
And as I said, this is irrelevant. You're comparing apples and oranges.
In 2010, US defense spending was approximately $2 billion/day. And that's just what has been accounted for.
No, the federal government can account for what payments it needs to make to the individual departments including the Pentagon. If it could not, then the Federal Reserve and Treasury would be utterly unable to manage government finance. You are mixing up internal financial management within the Pentagon with
fiscal policy relating to the entire US budget.
That the Pentagon has been soaking up large sums of money is not news. Nor is it news that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan bloated that overall number in the 2000s. Nor is it news that increased defense spending has added to the deficit. One of the articles linked earlier estimated that 20% of the deficit increase could be ascribed to those wars. The article also featured a graph showing the extraordinary above-budget expenses incurred by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It really doesn't surprise me that Truthers are functional morons when it comes to understanding the workings of modern government, business and the military, but really, have you tried counting how many troops have been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2001 to the present? Ever followed the actual course of operations at all?
Even with the incredibly high cost of deploying US troops with their very hi-tech equipment and logistic support, there are still limits in how much it's going to cost
as a share of GDP.
Moreover, we have the perfectly good yardstick of Vietnam - defense spending to fund Vietnam (while also funding commitments to NATO etc) came close to 10% of GDP in the late 1960s. Because taxes were not raised in an era when the dollar was still convertible to gold (the Bretton Woods system), this caused a variety of inflationary pressures that led to the end of Bretton Woods and the onset of 70s stagflation (in tandem with the '73 oil shock).
The US fielded 500,000 men in Vietnam and lost over 8,000 aircraft and helicopters - 5000 US Army helicopters alone were shot down or crashed. Huge, huge costs, measured by the standards of the era. That's why US defense spending reached a significantly higher proportion of GDP.
US forces in Iraq never broke the 200,000 barrier; equipment losses were a fraction of the losses in Vietnam - 75 helicopters were destroyed according to one source I've seen, versus 5,000 helicopters destroyed in Vietnam (and compared with 45,000 aircraft lost in WWII - when defense spending approached 40% of GDP).
Sure, the US has spent a lot on the war of terror, but not nearly as much, proportionately, as was spent on previous wars. At best the increased defense spending did not help much when the credit crunch hit in 2007-2008, but the fundamental causes of the credit crunch lay elsewhere. The amount of money that was sunk into bad
commercial loans was enormous. Indeed, the Bush tax cuts had a bigger effect on the deficit than the extraordinary costs of the war on terror.
