Nope! It's in the Other Hand!

One fascinating thing to me, other than how it's apparently scientifically impossible for women to have their money already out of their purses and ready to be handed over as they're boarding a bus, is that the costs of the Iraq & Afghanistan Wars were not factored into either the Defense Budget or the deficit during the Bush administration. Unbelievable. "Okay Pentagon, you get $481B...not including money for actual wars we're fighting, of course." If I meet with a professional paramour, I do not pay her $100 for her flower and then another $100 for merely existing.

A la HERE:

What a difference with today’s wars. Five years into the Iraq conflict and seven years into Afghanistan, the administration and Congress have buried all of the explicit funding—totaling more than the spending on either the Korea or Vietnam wars when adjusted for inflation—in emergency supplementals. What changed? Aside from internal fiscal discipline, the single biggest procedural shift came in 2002, when the Congress let lapse a law that had required budget cuts to “offset” emergency expenditures.

Who benefited? The Pentagon, the political party that ran Washington in the early 2000s, and their friends.

This year the Department of Defense once again failed to include the cost of war in its record-breaking $515 billion defense budget for fiscal year 2009. Instead, it included a placeholder for yet another $70 billion emergency war supplemental—which, conveniently for the administration, does not get counted in deficit projections.

Thankfully, Obama is looking to have actual accounting during his administration and not an endless run of magic tricks and "looky, a shiny quarter!!!"-type distractions. To be honest, as I look back I'm mildly surprised Bush didn't simply offer to just buy everybody in the country a pony. Who can be bothered to look into things like budgets and deficits when you're making new ribbons to put in Miss Elijah D. Pony's beautiful, silky hair? Certainly not me.