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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

http://www.comw.org/qdr/fulltext/100223williams.pdf

> Growth in Budgets for Military Health Care

> The DoD's health care costs rose from about $20 billion in 1998 to $47 billion in 2010 (FY 2010 dollars)—an annual growth rate of 7.4 percent above inflation. Absent changes in policy, CBO projects they will at least double between now and 2028.

It's no sale because it's ~2% of the budget masked in emotion, which is at best an irrelevant distraction and at worst a deliberate attempt to demonize opposing views.

Limit the focus to just the (increasingly ill-named) "defense" budget and even then it's only around 10% and is dwarfed by the cost of discretionary operations within that budget/department.

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I think your focus on this one example instead of his larger argument could also be considered an irrelevant distraction. VA benefits are part of two of your big three so they seem relevant to me. In order to cut taxes we have to cut something from the big three and VA care is such a thing that could be cut to pay for tax cuts. It seems completely relevant to me, and yes it is emotional, that's why we never deal with this problem. The estate tax is emotional too, especially when called the death tax. It seems impossible to talk about this stuff without dealing with things that are emotionally charged.

I believe you want the Department of Veteran Affairs. The 2010 budget was $114 billion.

http://www.va.gov/budget/products.asp

That last argument was about tax cuts, though, and not military health care spending. Even if we held military spending constant, it still would have been irresponsible to cut taxes because there was no corresponding spending cut that ensured those tax cuts were paid for.

I agree with what you're saying about the big issues and the 3 sources of deficits. But when considering something like the estate tax cut, it makes sense to consider the 'cost' of it in terms of either borrowing necessary to replace the lost revenue, or the cost of cutting government programs to make up for the lost revenue. The $50 billion or whatever cost of the estate tax cut might be a drop in the bucket compared to the overall deficit, but it should still be dealt with responsibly.

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