Political Quotes

“this week we begin the annual process of marking up our defense bills. These are the largest bills that we enact in this Congress each year and, perhaps, I would argue, the most important. Unfortunately, we are facing an impossible situation. The only major area of Federal spending where this administration has actually cut has been in the area of national security. All other Federal agencies have either remained stagnant or they have received slight increases. In fact, this is the twelfth consecutive year of defense cuts. Some would say, well, we are still spending more money on the military, but the facts all prove otherwise. In John Kennedy's era, a time of relative peace after Korea and before Vietnam, we were spending 52 cents of every Federal tax dollar on the military. This year, we are spending 15 cents on the military. In John Kennedy's era, we spent 9 percent of our country's gross national product on defense. This year, it is 2.9 percent. And back in John Kennedy's era, Mr. Speaker, we had a draft where young people were taken out of high school and they were forced to serve the country and then they served for 2 years and left the service of the Nation. Today, we have an all-volunteer force, well-paid, families, children, education costs, housing costs. So quality of life is a much larger portion of that smaller amount of money that we spend on defense. Our job is to try to meet the needs of our military in a very difficult budget environment.”