It is frightening that there is someone in the White House just making these things up for Trump to blurt out, and he just keeps repeating the lies made in other pubic speeches to the military about budgets and procurement.
"We’ve just secured -- you’ve read all about it -- a $700 billion (defense budget increase), the largest-ever amount of money to support our great war fighters."
The major spending bill earlier this year raised the defense budget -- the combination of the base defense budget and the amount for overseas operations -- to $700 billion in fiscal year 2018 and to $719 billion in fiscal year 2019
The percentage increase for those two years is large by historical standards, but it’s not the all-time record holder.
If you combine the base budget and overseas operations, which is the metric Trump used in his speech, the defense budget is set to rise by 11.3 percent in 2018 and 10.7 percent In 2019.
That’s a smaller increase than several other recent presidents.
www.politifact.com/...
- Error #1: The $700B defense budget for FY18 is not the largest ever. It was larger under the Obama administration: $710B in FY11 and $714B in FY10. And that's without adjusting for inflation!
- Error #2: The number of ships in the Navy today is not the smallest since the end of WWI. We have 283 ships today, and in 2007 (Bush administration) we had 279.
- Error #3: The Navy will not get to 355 ships "very soon." The Navy's 30-year plan says it will not get to that level until after 2050, but it could possibly be accelerated to the 2030s. Either way, it's not very soon.
- Error #4: Getting to 355 ships is not an increase of "a couple of hundred" ships. Here's the math: 355 - 283 = 72
- Error #5: The 355-ship fleet has not yet been "approved." The ships have not all been authorized yet, and Congress appropriates the money one year at a time.
- Error #6: This year's military pay raise is not the first in ten years. There were pay raises in each of the past ten years, & some were higher than this year's raise.
FY09: 3.9%
FY10: 3.4%
FY11: 1.4%
FY12: 1.6%
FY13: 1.7%
FY14: 1.0%
FY15: 1.0%
FY16: 1.3%
FY17: 2.1%
FY18: 2.4%
Two graduates of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., penned an op-ed in The Baltimore Sun questioning President Trump's suitability to deliver the commencement speech to this year's graduating class of midshipmen on Friday.
"It is right and fitting that the president of the United States give a commencement address to a service academy’s graduating class," Daniel Barkhuff and William Burke wrote in Wednesday's edition of the paper.
"It is also right and fitting that citizens of the democracy for which these graduates will soon be charged with protecting point out the personal cowardice, narcissism and incompetency of the current president."
Barkhuff and Burke graduated from the Academy in 2001. They now work at Veterans for Responsible Leadership.
www.usatoday.com/...