Thinking about the disappointing field of Republican candidates this year, one might ask what has happened to the Grand Old Party. Back in 1964, leading Republicans were way better – with respect to style and substance. During the Goldwater campaign, Ronald Reagan delivered the great speech “A Time for Choosing”:
No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income.
We are spending $45 billion on welfare. Now, do a little arithmetic and you’ll find that if we divided the $45 billion up equally among those nine million poor families, we’d be able to give each family $4’600 a year. And this added to their current income should eliminate poverty.
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While there is much that is wrong with US welfare-entitlement programs, I wonder why President Reagan only mentioned the annual $45 billion for federal entitlement programs but never a word about the defense budget, which seems to be a forbidden topic in the Republican Party.
According to http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/defense_budget_2012_3.html defense spending in 2012 will hit $ 925.2 billion. Defense eats up 25% of the federal budget while welfare entitlement programs are only 13%.
There are about 2 million civilian employees in the federal government (about half of one percent of the total US population) and about 600,000 work for the defense department.
The average annual budget for defense under President Reagan was about $591 billion for a total of about $4.7 trillion during his presidency. In comparison, if the annual welfare budget was $45 billion, that means only $360 billion was spent on federal entitlement programs when he was president.
There is a defense spending chart (starting with President Eisenhower) at http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/07/historical_defense_budget.html which shows defense spending is down under President Obama from the high it hit under President G. W. Bush.
Thanks for your comment.
I totally agree with you, although I would not call it “defense” spending. Most of that money is spent on foreign wars, not on “defense”. A distinction that is made by only one Republican candidate:
https://swissecon.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/defense-vs-military-spending/