Bush press briefing - internal affairs

He naturally brought up his funding request for the Iraq deployment. He's claiming that congress should not be telling the military what to do. The problem is that they are not doing that. The military does not answer to congress- they answer to the president. The president is the one who is constitutionally required to obey congress' demands.

His tired rhetoric about "funding the troops" is bull, not only because it's untruthful, but also because the requested funding is not limited to funding military operations in Iraq, but a myriad of other things. DefenseNews.com reports that the request includes $11.6B of funding for research and development of new weapons, upgrading aircraft fleets. These figures are ignored by the administration's "fact sheet". The administration does mention over $2.25B, marked for various aid programs, such as Darfur and the Palestinian Authority.

What does it mean to you, the tax-payer? Spending $190B this year means the Bush administration is trying to impose a renewal of the existing Iraq War Tax on U.S. taxpayers. Dividing the cost among the current 303 million citizens, means each citizen is being taxed $645.75 this year. Of course when you consider than not everyone pays taxes, this figure goes up slightly. And when multiplied by 3.14 for the average family size, we see that each U.S. family is being taxed $2,027.

In a White House fact sheet on the "generous" 2004 tax refund (sorry- couldn't easily find a more recent one), you find the following: "42 million families with children will receive an average tax cut of $2,067." That's great, except that the U.S. family ends up with an actual refund of $40. I doubt that would really help the economy.