The Bush Budget:  All Guns, No Butter
MinutemanMedia

by Greg Tarpinian

[George W. ] Bush’s $2.57 trillion budget for 2006 increases military spending by 4.8 percent – not including the war in Iraq – and cuts all other federal government programs by 0.5 percent. The deepest cuts are aimed at services for working Americans and the poor.

The primary purpose of this budget is to fund the war machine needed to push foreign policy objectives in the Middle East and to guarantee military dominance in the world. It represents a 41 percent increase in military spending since 2001. For fiscal 2006, that spending will rise to $419.3 billion, not including the $100 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan, and billions more for the military, hidden in other agency budgets.

U.S. military spending is now larger than the rest of the world’s combined. The second largest is by China, at $51 billion, followed by Russia at $50.8 billion, Japan at $41.4 billion and the United Kingdom at $41.3. Iran and North Korea – the two countries that Bush most often cites as military threats – spend about $5 billion each. The Bush budgets no longer represent simple adjustments or new priorities in spending, but a set of fundamental changes.

These include redirecting nearly all federal resources to the military, channeling huge amounts of spending to the private sector, shifting the tax burden away from the corporations and the wealthy and onto the working class, and relying on deficit spending to finance the military buildup without raising taxes.

Greg Tarpinian is the president and executive director, Labor Research Association, a New York City-based non-profit research and advocacy organization that provides research and educational services for trade unions.

(Click here to read the entire story)