Quote:
Originally Posted by roadrunner_0
yes but i read somewhere that it DOES include the costs of the wars in iraq and afghanistan, which were always kept secret by your superhero republican party - thus completely negating your 30% figure i would imagine.
and on the same subject, how the hell did your republicans for the last few years go 'this is our budget for the year, apart from this stuff cos we dont want you to know how much it costs!'
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I think you're a bit confused about the US budget process. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were funded off-budget, but the amounts weren't secret. All of our wars start off being funded off-budget (I guess we're just not that good at forecasting) and eventually they get moved on-budget. Bush certainly dragged his feet in getting it put on-budget, undoubtedly to make the budget itself look better; but Obama is playing a similar game. He knows that Iraq funding was already scheduled to decline, so putting it on-budget now means he can take full credit for 'reducing the budget' going forward (or he can offset reduced Iraq funding with other spending and claim he's not increasing the budget).
Keeping items on- or off-budget for political reasons is a long-standing tradition in the US. Social Security has always been off-budget, for example, so that the government can borrow from the Social Security Trust Fund to make the budget look good (or at least make it look better than it would otherwise).
[edit]Oh, and Obama has proposed spending $180B on Iraq and Afghanistan for FY2010, so that accounts for 5% of his $3.55T budget. [/edit]
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