A Ways to Go
Wednesday, March 21, 2012 at 10:21AM | BFAD Defense spending ebbs and flows in the U.S. and, once it’s on a trend, it tends to stay there for about a decade. But the Pentagon’s budget proposal doesn’t reflect this. In a recent event at the Roosevelt Institute, BFAD’s Gordon Adams provided some context for that plan:
The defense budget that Panetta has proposed over the next ten years is a flat budget, basically keeps up with inflation, but no more. Not bad from defense terms but nothing like the historic build-downs that we’ve had.
Revisiting a point he made two months ago, when he called the Secretary’s budget forecast “unrealistically high,” Gordon went on to predict that:
We’ll see something like 20 to 25 [percent] – at least – reduction in constant dollars in the defense budget.
Decisions of that magnitude are still a ways off, of course. As Gordon said in his post last week , right now everyone is looking to November’s election as the next big signal.
Gordon Adams :: Interview from Roosevelt Institute on Vimeo.