House GOP Budget Cooks the Books to Avoid Defense Cuts
by John Glaser, Anti-War Blog
click here for original article
Remember sequestration? Well, according to the mandatory cuts to the federal budget, funding for fiscal year 2014 can’t exceed $967 billion. Funny then, that House Republicans have proposed a budget of $988 billion for 2014.
The reason, according to the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven, “appears to be that the GOP wants to manufacture angst over sequestration’s hit to defense spending, which is a Republican sacred cow.” DeHaven continues:
The Congressional Budget Office’s score of the House Republican CR shows that defense is funded at $20 billion above the sequestration-included cap for fiscal 2014. However, non-defense funding is actually $1 billion below it. Thus, it seems clear that the CR was intentionally written to force the sequestration-defense issue, which would kick-in in January.
I’m obviously not privy to the wheeling and dealing going on among the House Republicans responsible for constructing the CR. However, below the jump is a CR one-pager produced by the House Appropriations Committee–presumably for distribution to the flock– that supports the appearance of an attempt to manufacture angst over defense cuts.
Note that the one-pager rather shamelessly claims that “If the next round of FY14 sequester cuts kicks in under current law, ALL of the reductions will come out of national defense.” Yes, but that’s because the authors of the one-pager kept non-defense funding at the sequestration-cap and put defense spending $20 billion over it!
According to this one page propaganda piece from the House Appropriations Committee, “Defense to bear the full weight of FY14 sequester cuts–approximately $20B. Pentagon officials have called them ‘dangerous’ to our national security.”
Silly Republicans, tricks are for kids. Incidentally, I got the feeling Senator James Inhofe, one of the fiercest foreign policy hawks in Congress, opposed Obama’s plan to bomb Syria for similar political reasons. In interviews, Inhofe repeatedly said he couldn’t support a war on Syria because sequestration has gutted the defense budget (which, of course, is a big lie).
Not surprisingly, Inhofe, like I’m sure the House Republicans who proposed this misleading budget, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the defense industry.
