Sticker Shock

Forget gold toilet seats and $500 hammers, today's Pentagon makes the Reagan-era military look like old ladies on social security. President Bush's budget basically asks for a completely insane $739 billion. Fred Kaplan in Slate does a little budget bust-out to give us an idea of where the money is going. Particularly depressing news of the day: The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have now cost the nation $661.9 billion. Kaplan puts the defense budget request in a bit of historical perpective:

Measured in real terms (that is, adjusted for inflation), that's about one-third higher than the previous record for U.S. military spending, set in 1952, when more than 30,000 American soldiers were dying in the Korean War and the Pentagon was embarking on its massive Cold War rearmament drive.