How much does body armor cost? even if you just consider the first two appropriations of over 700 million to outfit ALL 150,000 troops over there that's 5 grand per soldier. seriously.
Can't we get the bulk discount? How many of the 150,000 soldiers are front line enough to need it every day. Talk about corporate greed, lobbyists, and stupid politicians.
Originally Posted by budman33
When robin hood posted his misleading 'facts' , he failed to mention that the process is fuc'd up. Yes many people 'appear' to vote aganist something that looks like a no brainer when all you do is look at a snap shot of the vote. If you step back and look at it in more detail you will see that they were not voting aganist things for our soldiers overseas but aganist the pork barrel items in the bill.
But hey some say our founding fathers set up a great system. The proof is in the pudding.
Without understanding how the system works, you have people twisting votes and playing politics with peoples lives. It is sickening to me.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/10/31/60minutes/main652491.shtml
Wheeler says $2.8 billion that was earmarked for operations and maintenance to support U.S. troops has been used to "pay the pork bill."
Wheeler, who has written a book called "The Wastrels of Defense," says congressmen routinely hide billions of dollars in pet projects in the defense bill.
And buried in the back of this one, Wheeler found a biathlon jogging track in Alaska, a brown tree snake eradication program in Hawaii, a parade ground maintenance contract for a military base that closed years ago, and money for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial celebration.
By law, these projects can't be cut, so Pentagon bookkeepers will have to dip into operations and maintenance accounts to pay for them.
"They do all kinds of things that adds up to: 'We're basically eating our own young to support the war,'" he says.
According to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a member of the Armed Services Committee who speaks out against pork-barrel spending, there is a total of $8.9 billion of pork in this year's defense bill, which would go a long way toward upgrading all the equipment used by the National Guard.
"I don't think that this war has truly come home to the Congress of the United States," McCain says. "This is the first time in history that we've cut taxes during a war. So I think that a lot of members of Congress feel that this is just sort of a business-as-usual situation."
"The least sexy items are the mundane - food, repair items, maintenance – there's no big contract there," says McCain. "And so there's a tendency that those mundane but vital aspects of war fighting are cut and routinely underfunded."
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Originally Posted by WTF
