{"id":21711,"date":"2013-09-16T06:58:59","date_gmt":"2013-09-16T14:58:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=21711"},"modified":"2013-09-16T07:01:07","modified_gmt":"2013-09-16T15:01:07","slug":"house-gop-budget-cooks-the-books-to-avoid-defense-cuts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/09\/16\/house-gop-budget-cooks-the-books-to-avoid-defense-cuts\/","title":{"rendered":"House GOP Budget Cooks the Books to Avoid Defense Cuts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Remember sequestration? Well, according to the mandatory cuts to the federal budget,\u00a0funding for fiscal year 2014 can\u2019t exceed $967 billion. Funny then, that House Republicans have proposed a budget of\u00a0$988 billion for 2014.<\/p>\n

\"Pentagon\"The reason, according to the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven<\/a>, “appears<\/em>\u00a0to be that the GOP wants to manufacture angst over sequestration\u2019s hit to defense spending, which is a Republican sacred cow.” DeHaven continues:<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Congressional Budget Office\u2019s score<\/a>\u00a0of the House Republican CR shows that defense is funded at $20 billion above the sequestration-included cap for fiscal 2014. However, non-defense funding is actually $1 billion below it. Thus, it seems clear that the CR was intentionally written to force the sequestration-defense issue, which would kick-in in January.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m obviously not privy to the wheeling and dealing going on among the House Republicans responsible for constructing the CR. However, below the jump is a CR one-pager produced by the House Appropriations Committee\u2013presumably for distribution to the flock\u2013 that supports the appearance of an attempt to manufacture angst over defense cuts.<\/p>\n

Note that the one-pager rather shamelessly claims that \u201cIf the next round of FY14 sequester cuts kicks in under current law, ALL of the reductions will come out of national defense.\u201d Yes, but that\u2019s because the authors of the one-pager kept non-defense funding at the sequestration-cap and put defense spending $20 billion over it!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

According to this one page propaganda piece from the House Appropriations Committee, “Defense<\/strong>\u00a0to bear the full weight of FY14 sequester cuts\u2013approximately\u00a0$20B<\/strong>. Pentagon officials have called them ‘dangerous’ to our national security.”<\/p>\n

Silly Republicans, tricks are for kids. Incidentally, I got the feeling Senator James Inhofe, one of the fiercest foreign policy hawks in Congress, opposed Obama’s plan to bomb Syria for similar political reasons. In interviews, Inhofe repeatedly said he couldn’t support a war on Syria because sequestration has gutted the defense budget (which, of course, is<\/a> a big lie<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, Inhofe, like I’m sure the House Republicans who proposed this misleading budget, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars<\/a> in campaign contributions from the defense industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember sequestration? Well, according to the mandatory cuts to the federal budget,\u00a0funding for fiscal year 2014 can\u2019t exceed $967 billion. Funny then, that House Republicans have proposed a budget of\u00a0$988 billion for 2014. The reason, according to the Cato Institute’s Tad DeHaven, “appears\u00a0to be that the GOP wants to manufacture angst over sequestration\u2019s hit to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-21711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21711"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21715,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21711\/revisions\/21715"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21711"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=21711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}