Americans should question federal spending priorities

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http://www.suntimes.com/output/martire/cst-edt-mart28.html

August 28, 2004

BY RALPH MARTIRE Advertisement

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A presidential election is the perfect time to debate national priorities. What do Americans value: schools, jobs, a clean environment, a strong military, housing opportunity or health care coverage? Polls indicate each is important. Politicians echo the polls. Rhetoric aside, the clearest indication of elected officials' priorities come from the allocation of resources.

Our country's spending indicates defense is crucial, but education, health and human services, housing, urban development and environmental protection, not so much. According to the president's budget office, last fiscal year the United States budgeted $787 billion for discretionary spending. Congress and the president then exercised their discretion to expend 51 percent of that sum on defense and homeland security. Mind you, that's without accounting for the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, total discretionary spending for education, health and human services, housing and urban development and environmental protection, combined, was $163 billion -- accounting for only 18.5 percent of discretionary spending. To put our country's domestic spending in context, the feds paid almost as much, $156 billion, in interest on the deficit last year, as on all these domestic services.

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You'd think running consecutive record deficits would instill some accountability into the budget process. At the very least, you'd think the folks preparing the budget would cover the anticipated costs of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. You'd be wrong. The defense budget for fiscal year 2005 targets $25 billion to Iraq/Afghanistan for the year. We're spending almost $8 billion a month on the war, and the GAO recently released a report showing our armed services have already exceeded last year's appropriations by more than $12 billion. In other words, the fiscal 2005 budget underestimates the reasonably anticipated war costs, and corresponding deficit, by at least $80 billion.

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