One of the oddities of the new Obama budget is his bizarre insistence on defense cuts in areas that don’t deserve them. How can we tell that such cuts are unjustified? Here’s a great example: the Department of Defense weather satellite was deemed an “unnecessary and lower-priority” program; meanwhile, the Department of Commerce’s “geostationary weather satellite systems, as well as satellite-borne measurements of sea level and potentially damaging solar storms” saw increased funding.
This is the lie of the Obama Administration: that they’re interested in cutting when they’re really interested in growing government. Remember back in January 2012, President Obama announced that he wanted to eliminate the Department of Commerce entirely, suggesting instead that it be replaced with a series of other bureaucratic entities designed to do the job more efficiently. Now, however, he has proposed increasing the Department of Commerce funding by 5%, the largest departmental increase in the budget.
The insistence on cutting defense programs even while spending hundreds of million of dollars to fund the misnamed Arab Spring seems bizarre at the very least.
But there’s a reason that Democrats made their budget cut proposals contingent on military funding being cut: they dislike the military strongly, and want America to be a far less assertive global leader. They’d prefer we spend the money on critical items here at home … like weather satellites that may harm commerce. Or something.
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