Military Budget
Nader/Gonzalez would cut the bloated, wasteful military budget.
Earlier this year, President Bush announced a military budget of over $600 billion.
And that’s not counting the full cost of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The proposed military budget represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs - the items that Congress gets to vote up or down on an annual basis.
The Democrats and Republicans have been silent about this rapid escalation in military expenditures, despite many critical reports by the Government Accountability Office and Pentagon auditors.
In fact, they want to increase them.
Barack Obama, for example, has said that he wants to "bump up" the military budget.
Hillary Clinton and Obama have committed themselves to increasing the armed forces by tens of thousands of troops.
John McCain would outdo them both.
As budget analyst William Hartung points out "the United States is already spending more for defense than all the other nations in the world combined."
Hartung points out that tens of billions of dollars are being wasted on systems like the F-22 fighter plane, the V-22 Osprey (a helicopter that can be transformed into a conventional aircraft), the Virginia class submarine, and an unworkable and unnecessary missile defense system.
Right now, the military budget is being used to fuel wasteful, reckless, destabilizing foreign interventions that violate constitutional and international law.
Nader/Gonzalez would cut the military budget to a level needed to protect the country.
