The intelligence budget is on a "need to know" basis. And the citizens don't need to know.
by digby
So those silly progressives in the House think that the people should know how much money is being spent on intelligence operations. That's just ridiculous. If the government thought we needed to know how our tax dollars were being spent, don't you think they'd tell us?
The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) is calling on the executive branch to disclose the federal government’s budget for U.S. intelligence operations and agencies — the so-called “black budget” — in an effort to shine light on details that had remained secret until last summer when intelligence funding specifics were revealed from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
The 73 member CPC unveiled its “Better Off Budget” on Wednesday — which pledges to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years and create nearly 9 million jobs by 2017 — to serve as a counter proposal to the Republican one that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) will offer next month.
The CPC — which is co-charied by Reps. Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) — says it “believes that taxpayer-funded government surveillance programs must not infringe on American taxpayers’ constitutionally-protected rights to privacy and free expression” and that its budget proposal “seeks to provide accountability for these vast, highly technical, and often unwieldy programs by requiring that the President disclose in his annual budget submissions to the Congress the total dollar amount requested for intelligence activities at each intelligence agency.”
[...]
Last August, the Washington Post revealed — based on the documents Snowden leaked — that for fiscal year 2013, the federal government had set aside nearly $53 billion for U.S. intelligence agencies and operations, including $14.7 billion for the CIA, the most requested for any agency. “Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007,” the Post reported, “it has not divulged how it uses the money or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.”
The CPC wants this information made public in the federal government’s annual budget. “By shining sunlight on our nation’s intelligence budget,” they say, “Congress will be better equipped to adopt meaningful reforms that ensure our intelligence programs strike the proper balance between national security and individual liberty.”
The derision with which this budget has been received by the Villagers in general, much less this provision, has been overwhelming. If only these hippies could be as respectable as that nice Paul Ryan, the man who went on the radio this week and basically accused African Americans of being the causes of poverty, what with all their shiftlessness and laziness. (And that was after he'd been shown to have basically copied and pasted erroneous conclusions to his big "study" apparently to pad it with citations that don't apply. Very very serious.)
So the Progressive Caucus puts out a budget in which the numbers all add up, the deficit is cut, people are put to work, kids are educated and old people are taken care of and it's declared dead on arrival by all the pundits. Why? Because it raises taxes on millionaires --- which is such an outrageous proposal it might as well have been a proposal to fund the government with unicorn spit.
If only they'd strap some guns to their legs, slap some tri-corner hats on their heads and start babbling about tyranny and liberty then maybe the media would take it seriously.
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