This aside in an article about the Chinese air defense identification zone ploy annoys me:
With several nations concerned about China's rise, Obama has declared Asia to be a top priority and shifted naval resources there, although the United States is also reducing military spending -- which is more than four times China's official level -- to tame a debt from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a recession.
The cost of the wars represents a tiny portion of our accumulated debt over the last 13 years
And the response to recession has simply become our baseline spending rather than an extraordinary response to the 2008 financial crisis and aftermath. If not, the president wouldn't be able to bizarrely assert that he has kept spending relatively flat going forward from elevated crisis-response 2009 levels, as if that means he is a careful spender.
The top sliver is Iraq War spending. The next one is Afghanistan--which I thought was the "good war," so why blame that anyway?
If we can't afford to make our pivot to Asia and the Pacific real, it is because our government has really pivoted to domestic spending. I thought Bush spent too much on non-defense spending. Now we can only dream of getting back to his levels of deficit spending.
