Obama's Outrageous Defense Appropriation

I was just mind-boggled and dumbfounded at Obama's $709 billion Defense Department budget appropriation for next year. That's not to mention the recent request being formulated for an additional $33 billion on top of that for the Afghan and Iraq wars.

Can this be correct? $742 billion in total defense expenditures? Almost three-quarters of a trillion dollars on bombs, guns, and violence? WTF?

That's almost as much as the cost of the current Healthcare Reform bills, which the Obama administration and the Congress have tried to make as defecit neutral as possible.

As I've said before, 2010 is the year where one of Obama's absolute top priorities needs to be to get a handle on the federal budget deficit and begin to bend that deficit curve downwards. A Defense Department budget for 2010 of $742 billion is NOT a good start down the road to dealing with this priority.

Obama just needs to take the heat from opportunistic Republicans who will call him soft on defense for cutting defense spending, and revisit this absurd Defense Department appropriation.