This is probably the biggest canard being pushed. Go down to a local VA Hospital…it isn’t filled with OIF Vets…it is filled with WWII, Korea and Vietnam Vets.

There are 26 million living veterans. The vast majority of VA expenditure is providing income qualified services. I know a WWII vet…took advantage of the GI bill and got a home loan in the ’50s…never had any further dealings with the VA until his doctor put him on some $300/month medications 3 or 4 years ago. The VA pays for his medications.

Speaking of clever, you certainly appear well-read enough to understand that the national security strategy is written by a duly elected executive supported by the national security bureaucracy, parsed by OMB for its underlying assumptions and debated and discussed line item by line item, yes F-22′s and DD-X’s too – by the duly elected legislature. This includes committees both for program authorization and appropriation before going before both chambers (after differences are ironed out in committee), approved and signed into law. Grown ups, in other words – and Hey! Anon even gets a vote in the process!

These are serious people who do serious work for a living, and they don’t generally go around thinking that “absolute dollars spending vs peer nations is a good place to start” since for one thing, em: We don’t really have any peer nations.
Japan’s GDP is number 2 in the world, and a little less than 1/3 of ours. It’s also a country with a suspect track record in a strategically important part of the world whose security therefore depends upon the forward engagement of US power. And that’s just in one theater of concern – our national strategy has us pretty much everywhere and for the most part, that’s worked out well for everyone concerned.

You might be interested in trimming ourselves down “self-defense force” status and then hoping to kick-off at the next coin toss in a fair fight on the home turf, but it’s not hard to see why other rational folks might disagree with you.

As far as “table 8.2″ and previous administrations, I decline to debate a rebuttal to a point I never made, no, not even “obliquely.” Straw men everywhere protest, I know, but there it is.

Re: North Korea and soft power, I’ll believe it if it lasts. But it won’t be the first time the Norks have played crawdad on international obligations, nor the last I suspect. In any case, North Korea is a unique case – no one is much interested in their ideology, and the regime’s chief interest is its own perpetuation. That’s a much different prospect than we were dealing with in Iraq after 12 years of soft-power UN Sanctions that did nothing to stop the tyrant from enriching himself on the backs of a brutalized population.

It’s easy to see why you think OIF was a poor appropriation of national resources. Many people who believe this appear to think that 1) The clock would would have stopped advancing on 19 Marcy 2003 if we hadn’t crossed the LOD, or 2) Even if history had kept moving, everything would have probably been just OK. Alternative history fiction can be interesting, but at the end of the day it adds up once again to a non-rebuttable expression of faith. We are where we are.

BTW, wrt to education, I bet most of the states would give those transfer payments back given the choice, so long as that meant they could get out from under the unfunded mandates that the feds impose upon local governments. You seem to imply that taking money from individuals within the states in the form of federal income tax and then re-disbursing it back to the states in the form of “largess” (after having taken a cut off the top to support to the federal bureaucracy) is a good way to run what has always been a local institution. Me, I’m feeling a lot of friction in that machine.

There was one comment I had considered making during your little conversation with Lex and that was that if, as here, federal monies are given to states for education and other purposes, then the comment about eduation being a state expenditure was a little disingenuous. But you saved me the trouble.

Personally, I’m not arguing for or against because I’m reading and listening. To both sides. Last time I checked it worked as a fairly decent way to learn things. And I stand by my previous comments. And agree with Babs as to your arrogance. I suppose you think those throw-away comments you made were “helpful”. Or perhaps you’re just practicing to be a politician.

I was divorced by one, and divorced another (hey, it matters to *me* whose idea it was) and I recieved my entire retirement check, complete. Not a penny after taxes goes anywhere but my bank and the VA.