UA-9726592-1

Monday, February 1, 2010

Democratic Underground: John Boehner says Pentagon Should Be Part Of Spending Freeze

Rachel Slajda | February 1, 2010, 9:45AM

House Minority Leader John Boehner said Sunday that defense spending should not be exempt from President Obama's proposed spending freeze.

"I think the president's proposal on freezing non-security domestic spending is a good first step, but it's only $15 billion for each of the next three years," Boehner said on Meet The Press.

I think we can do much better than that. I don't think any agency of the federal government should be exempt from rooting out wasteful spending or unnecessary spending. 

And I, frankly, I would agree with it at the Pentagon. There's got to be wasteful spending there, unnecessary spending there. It all ought to be eliminated, and we should be going through this budget line by line and, and asking the question, is this spending worth having to borrow money that our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay back? 

That's the real question. And if we went through the budget line by line like that, I think there's a lot more spending that we could cut.

Obama has proposed freezing non-defense discretionary spending for the next three years, which should save $250 billion from the national deficit over the next 10 years, according to the New York Times. But the Pentagon -- as well as some non-defense areas such as the Department of Education, Medicaid and Medicare -- is exempt from the freeze.

Boehner apparently agrees with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who last week said the defense budget "should not be exempted" from the freeze.

Rightardia: The Major was involved in defense budgeting and knows billions could be cut from defense spending form little impact on the mission. One way to do this would be to stop the spending surge at the end of the fiscal year. If you don't spend your budget by the end of the year, you lose it and the accounting office pools all of the excess funds to so they can be spent before the end of the fiscal year. This practice should be discouraged. 

Of course, a lot of this end of year spending is rolled into local economics to purchase new office furniture, personal computers and office supplies using local purchase procedures. So changing this policy could be good news for American taxpayers, but bad news for the local economy that is near a defense facility.

Source: Talking Points Memo

Read more: http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/boehne...

Subscribe to the Rightardia feed: feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/IGiu

Netcraft rank: 4217 http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=http://rightardia.blogspot.com

Powered by ScribeFire.

No comments: