Veep Drinking Game

Sequester Effect on the Military


I was skimming through the news and notice this headline from ABC news, "Most Back Cuts Overall – But Not to the Military". By a nearly 2 to 1 margin people are opposed to cutting the military budget in this country. Although, they did only poll about a thousand people. The people polled apparently support cutting, education, health benefits, and other social services but not the war machine.

With the sequester the department of defense will receive a roughly 8% reduction is spend equality $43 billion from defense programs.

To put that in prospective.
  • The war in Iraq, according to the DOD totaled at least $757.8 billion. That doesn’t count cost of medical care for veterans, and the war in Afghanistan. Giving us over $1 billion per year of the war.
  • As of 2007 there was an estimated $10 billion dollars lost through waste or mismanagement in the wars
  • The United States plans to buy a total of 2,443 F-35 strike fighters at a cost of about $130 million per plane. And it doesn't even work and has never been used in combat.
  • The military has 2 thousand tanks sitting on a base in Nevada that it doesn't even want and congress has forced them to buy. At roughly 8 million per tank.

Call me crazy, but I'm thinking, cutting a few broken planes and unwanted tanks from the military budget, isn't going to prevent us from fighting a war with every other country on the planet if we wanted.
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In fact, even with the budget cuts the military spending in this country is projected to increase every year along with the national deficit. 

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