Jay Inslee: “The way it is is that those of us who are raising questions about this proposal, I will not call it a plan because it…”

“The way it is is that those of us who are raising questions about this proposal, I will not call it a plan because it does not rise to the dignity of a plan. It is not a Marshall Plan. It is not even a partial plan. We do not have a schedule, we do not have a schematic, we do not have a plan. It is the beginning of a proposal of an idea maybe, but that is why we are here asking these questions. But what those of us who are asking these questions, the one thing we do know is this. The amount the administration has proposed for military expenditures is actually inadequate for the job at hand. We are the ones who are saying that what has been proposed is not enough to fulfill this responsibility. It is not enough because it does not take care of the health care of Reservists, it is not enough because it does not take care of the health care of National Guards, it does not provide some of the basics to the service personnel. It is billions of dollars short on what it is going to take to rebuild the tracked vehicles that get essentially destroyed in the sands of the Mideast. There are billions of dollars we are going to have to spend that are not in that figure that should be ultimately. There is not a method of paying for the interest on the debt they want to rack up to do this. In a whole host of ways, we are the ones who are saying we actually need to beef up the amount needed for the military expenditure in this mission.”