Defense Spending

One of the most striking things about American politics, is that in the political plane money spent by the defense department just doesn't count. It's not thought of as money that needs to be paid for by higher taxes and it's not thought of as money that needs to be paid for by reduced spending on other things. It's just magical money such that as long as you keep the annual increases in the single digits, it materializes out of the ether.

In the real world, of course, it doesn't work that way, but reality hardly matters in politics. To get new dollars spent on helping small children and their parents, you need to find offsets. To get new dollars spent on naval hardware, you merely need to show that the ship in question would have some conceivable use under some hypothetical scenario and will also provide jobs in X number of congressional districts. It's a pretty screwed up situation. Which is all by way of saying you should ready Justin Logan on defense spending.