Budget

The military portion of the budget is going up again. There is no sign that any of it will be used to resupply Guard and Reserve units that were stripped for overseas combat.

I used to date a guy in the military who likely let me know more about how his job worked than he should have. One of the things he did was prepare a raft of purchase orders in the couple of weeks before the end of the fiscal year so his unit would use up all the alloted money -- that way they could ask for more next year. They got along *fine* without all those "spend it or lose it" purchases, but this kind of thing is a ritual.

So here's a modest proposal.

At the start of the last month of the fiscal year, orders should be cut suspending all military purchasing. The money unspent at that time should be reapportioned to the Reserve and the Guard to pay for items like trucks, personnel carriers, and other pieces of equipment they left overseas. This should be done annually until all our units have been resupplied.

The gratuitous blowing of money at the end of the fiscal year should stop. We have too many deficiencies to make that acceptable any more.