Democrats Are Wrong About Defense Spending
The Democrats seeking their party’s 2020 presidential nomination will surely disagree about a great many things, such as the wisdom of Medicare for all, whether to embrace a Green New Deal, and how far to go when raising taxes. One emerging consensus, though, is that, as Senator Elizabeth Warren recently argued in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, “the Pentagon’s budget has been too large for too long.” Together with a number of rival presidential aspirants, including Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Jeff Merkley, and Bernie Sanders, she voted against the 2019 defense budget, which authorized an impressive-sounding $716 billion in spending.
It is a safe bet we will hear further calls for curbing the Pentagon’s putatively bloated budget from Warren and others in the weeks and months to come. But it would be
