Update and Correction: Team Obama adds 8% to Pentagon FY 09 budget.

UPDATE AND CORRECTION from HA by way of CQ:

If enacted, that would be about a $14 billion increase above the $513 billion allocated for fiscal 2009 (PL 110-329), including military construction funds, and it would match what the Bush administration estimated last year for the Pentagon in fiscal 2010. But it sets up a potential conflict between the new administration and the Defense Department’s entrenched bureaucracy, which has remained largely intact through the presidential transition.

Some Pentagon officials and congressional conservatives are already trying to portray the OMB number as a cut by comparing it to a $584 billion draft fiscal 2010 budget request compiled last fall by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The $527 billion figure is “what the Bush people thought was the right number last February and that’s the number we’re going with,” said the OMB official, who declined to be identified. “The Joint Chiefs did that to lay down a marker for the incoming administration that was unrealistic. It’s more of a wish list than anything else.”

Defense budget experts have said the draft by the Joint Chiefs, which was never publicly released, was designed to pressure the Obama administration to drastically increase defense spending or be forced to defend a reluctance to do so. Defense officials in past outgoing administrations have left inflated budget estimates for incoming officials in the hope of raising the spending baseline. In fact, the draft budget was never scrubbed by Bush’s OMB, which had told federal agencies to submit draft budgets based on “current services.”

One key issue is the administration’s decision to reduce supplemental appropriations by folding into the base Pentagon budget the non-war-related spending that has cropped up in supplemental bills.

The Pentagon refused to comment publicly on why it would need the higher amount. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said the fiscal 2010 defense budget must contend with the realities of the bad economy and stop the trend of steep increases in military budgets since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Gates also has said the department would deliver Congress a formal request for a second tranche of fiscal 2009 war funding “in the coming weeks.” He sent Congress an estimate for that tab that totaled $69.7 billion.

WWII Home Defense

Well we at MiM talked about this for over a year and were told a Democrat would NEVER do this in a time of war on two fronts….HotAir and ACE have the  developing story…FOX now has it up as well…this looks INCREDIBLY bad even to the most tone deaf person, when they are pushing through the biggest spending bill EVAH…

The Obama administration has asked the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to cut the Pentagon’s budget request for the fiscal year 2010 by more than 10 percent — about $55 billion — a senior U.S. defense official tells FOX News.

Hey with unemployment rising it’s a GREAT time to cut jobs in DoD ain’t it? Will the states with Defense Contractors call their Congress Critters?! I will, AZ has a LOT of jobs that will be lost…I will tell the two Congress Critters who are invited to watch the Superbowl with Obama that we aren’t too thrilled with these cuts in their home towns…

We predicted this. We kept posting the money quote from Obama’s interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC from March 27, 2008:

BARTIROMO: So name three spending programs you would cut to balance the budget.

Sen. OBAMA: Oh, you know, there are probably some weapons programs that I think are not serving our national security interests that need to be examined, and we’ve got to do an audit there. There are reforms that need to be made in our purchasing processes, where–simple things, you know. If we actually made sure that every government employee had a single, you know, debit card or credit card, then negotiated with large purchasers to get the discounts that any other large purchaser would get, we could lop off 10 percent of some of our major purchases by the federal government. Our travel allowances and expenses are a major problem. We could save several billion dollars just in how we set up government travel. So there are a whole bunch of areas where we can make some significant savings.

I will tell you, though, that historically when–you know, the fact is that the federal government primarily spends its money on Social Security, on Medicare and Medicaid, and on defense. And that’s the bulk of our spending.

MiM here, There you go, he laid it out right there a year ago and no one wanted to believe it. DEFENSE, SOCIAL SECURITY, MEDICARE AND MEDICAID. Now he is actually INCREASING enrollment in Medicaid AND Medicare in the stimulus porkfest.

That leaves Social Security and Defense to be cut, and he is on his 10th day already cutting Defense. So the Obots who trashed me for saying Obama would cut SS benefits or eliminate them or raise the retirement age before I get there, or increase my payroll taxes, well STFU number one, heh, and two, it IS coming, believe it, his economic adviser Jason Fuhrman is a BIG privatizer…

Maybe THIS is why he wont cut payroll taxes as part of the stimulus, he is ready to RAISE them….

Of course Obots don’t care as many of them are under 30..well the way this is going, your parents who support you while you are in school will be poor so don’t count on inheriting anything frakers….

Best comment EVAH from AceHQ:

108 One of these days, Barack Obama is going to stride to the podium, laugh maniacally, and pull off a latex mask to reveal a cackling Jimmy Carter, shouting “Bite me, Bitches!”

_{Think about it:  We haven’t seen the birth certificate, the college grades, no one remembers him from law school, etc…..}

Posted by: nickless at January 30, 2009 08:51 PM (MMC8r)

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