Bush’s New Defense Budget

By Robert Higgs

"When the Bush administration released its budget for fiscal year 2006 recently, the news media, as usual, had a tough time in making sense of the government’s proposals for defense spending. To some extent, we can’t blame them for their confusion, because even people who follow this subject closely have trouble sorting out the government’s various ways of stating the defense budget. Figures that appear at one place in the budget documents are often difficult or impossible to reconcile with figures that appear at other places in the documents. Conspiracy theorists might easily conclude that the government deliberately tries to make a clear understanding impossible. More charitably, we might conclude that the government simply does not know how to keep a clean set of books.

"The budget separates proposed spending into various categories, which outsiders have trouble keeping straight: 'outlays' are amounts of money to be spent during the fiscal year in question; 'budget authority' includes newly appropriated amounts of money to be spent during the fiscal year in question and perhaps during several later fiscal years as well. 'Mandatory spending' comprises dollars that must be spent (barring a change in statutory requirements), whereas 'discretionary spending' includes dollars that may be spent (and normally will be).

"In a section of the budget called 'Protecting America' appears the claim: 'Under this Administration, the Department of Defense (DOD) has received the largest increases in funding since the Reagan Administration. ... The 2006 request represents a 41-percent increase over 2001.' In the document’s historical tables, however, both Table 3.2 and Table 4.1 show that the military part of the Department of Defense’s proposed outlays for fiscal year 2006 exceed the 2001 figure by nearly 47 percent. Is the Bush administration being unnecessarily modest about its accomplishment in pumping up military spending or it is simply unaware of what its own data show? ..."

Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute’s quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College and Seattle University. He has been a visiting scholar at Oxford University and Stanford University, and a fellow for the Hoover Institution and the National Science Foundation.
Source: The Independent Institute

Are Iraqi Elections a Panacea?

By Ivan Eland

"President Bush, in his second inaugural address, used soaring idealistic rhetoric to tell us that he was going to democratize the Middle East. After the recent Iraqi elections, he declared a triumphant moment in that effort. Yet those elections—with their predictable results—may not mean much for the future of Iraq and might, when combined with other U.S. policies in the Islamic world, reinforce world perceptions of U.S. foreign policy as hypocritical.

"Iraqis should be commended for risking their lives to vote. Sadly, it may ultimately be in vain. The heavy turnout in Shi’ite localities and the light turnout in Sunni areas were predictable. The problem is that the Sunni insurgents may actually benefit from the increased estrangement of the Sunni community from the rest of the country, once it becomes clear the Sunnis are underrepresented in the new national assembly. The heavy voter turnout in the Shi’ite areas is not an endorsement of the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq. Instead it reflects a desire for the traditionally oppressed Shi’a to rule the other ethnic groups and the novelty of a real choice in elections after decades of sham plebiscites under multiple dictators.

"Merely having elections doesn’t guarantee that a unified Iraq will achieve a violence-free liberal federation. If the elected Shi’ite regime governs oppressively, the Sunni rebellion will be further inflamed. In any democracy, the majority—if given political power—can oppress minorities. After all, the Sunnis are now fighting, in part, to prevent “paybacks” from a Shi’ite government for all of the oppression that the Sunnis dished out to the Shi’a over the years ..."
Source: The Independent Institute