Preble: Budget Hawks Should Look at the Military

Cato’s Chris Preble seems confused here:

In two successive debates, moderators Jim Lehrer and Tom Brokaw have tried to pin the candidates down on what they would do to control spending, and both times the candidates have evaded the question. CBS’s Bob Schieffer gets his shot next week in the third and final debate. Rather than an open ended “What would you cut?” question, he might ask them how much their different plans for increasing the size of the military will cost the taxpayers.

Look, the first rule of Washington budgeting is that money spent on the Department of Defense doesn’t actually count as money. I think that’s in the Blue Dog Charter, a poster on the wall in Fred Hiatt’s office, and somewhere in the Declaration of Independence.

Preble uses some fuzzy math to show that John McCain’s proposed increases in Army personnel strength (to say nothing of other defense-related spending he seems to favor) would actually cost more money than could be saved by eliminating all earmarks, and therefore concludes that McCain maybe isn’t really a budget cutter. But when you consider that money spent on the Department of Defense doesn’t actually count as money you realize that McCain’s one of the fiercest foes of bloated spending there is. Life is just much simpler if you keep that simple maxim in mind.