Ted Cruz and his big military spending
The Tea Party movement always had one major issue with me that never did sit right– they always called for a shrinking of government spending and to a smaller federal government in general; however, it only entailed domestic spending cuts.
photo/ donkeyhotey
They conveniently left out, with rare exceptions, the big government spending that went along with the defense, or the way it’s usually used nowadays, the Department of Offense.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz is one of a plethora of Tea Party candidates that fit this bill, which was demonstrated during his speech at a decommissioned aircraft carrier in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina.
Cruz, who sometimes calls out the neoconservatives, while at the same time filling his adviser corp with well-known neocon thinkers, unveiled his plans for a massive military build-up if elected President.
This includes beefing up the Army to 525,000 soldiers, outdoing fellow Tea Party Senator Marco Rubio, and neocon darling by 35,000.
In addition, Cruz said he’d like to have a total active-duty force of at least 1.4 million, up from the current 1.3 million. Cruz also wants to beef up the Air Force to at least 6,000 planes, with a minimum of 1,500 tactical fighter aircraft, an increase from roughly 4,000 aircraft, naval ships and constructing new ballistic missile submarines and invest in anti-missile systems.
How much for all this expansion? According to Bloomberg, Cruz’s plan to spend 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product would have meant about $718 billion on military spending last year, about 23 percent more than the actual figure, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence. Defense outlays were $583 billion in 2015, or about 3.2 percent of GDP.
Defense outlays peaked in 2011 at $699 billion, due to the surge in Afghanistan and a continuation of the Iraq war.
Speaking of the price tag of his military spending proposal, Cruz responded in the classic Republican rhetoric,”If you think it’s too expensive to defend this nation, try not defending it.”
The American Spectator once wrote of Cruz: “Sen. Ted Cruz presented a well-thought out foreign and national defense policy based on the original Reagan conservatism.”
During Reagan’s 8 years in office the federal government spent a total of about 22% of GDP. (That’s the biggest-spending eight years since World War II.) Spending grew from $678 billion to $1.14 trillion.
During his tenure there was unprecedented government debt. Reagan had tripled the Gross Federal Debt, from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion. Ford and Carter in their combined terms could only double it. It took 31 years to accomplish the first postwar debt tripling, yet Reagan did it in eight.
Impressive conservative record?
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