Wednesday, January 26, 2011
"Discretionary" spending
President Obama proposes to:
"freeze annual domestic spending for the next five years. This would reduce the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, and will bring discretionary spending to the lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was president."Notice how military spending, which he gets to in the subsequent sentence, is not "discretionary." Apparently the U.S. simply has no choice but to invade and occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, continue bombing Pakistan, continue building more weapons (including new improved nuclear weapons), etc. It's kind of like Social Security - for war-profiteering corporations and imperialism in general.
I'm not going to analyze the entire hour of blather; it's really not worth the time. I will say that the one thing that really annoyed me is Obama's repeated use of the word "win." Not "succeed" or something positive on our own, but "win," as in "we're going to win, and the people in other countries are going to lose." Really, truly disgusting.