the president, when you re working with the democratic congress, ultimately they got to a deal and this was steve manu chen s deal that he cut. it s easy to get to a top line deal if both sides are spending a lot. the real explainers are the deficit hawks. those that worry about the side of the debt and worry about detectives to gdp ratios and servicing that debt. but when you keep spending like this, you can see how the president got to yes with speaker pelosi because he gave in on 12 weeks paid maternity leave as well, and he gave and he gave in on some other issues. but he did get a lot of spending for a defense. 22 billion over last year, which was not a small year. i think the first defense budget that the president had was around 703 billion, and now we re at 738. so this is year on year they are spending a lot. president mentioned aircraft carriers, submarines, a whole host cruisers. a whole host of new weapons systems for the pentagon. and then there s that space
the president met defense secretary mattis and armed services chairmen for lunch last week and reports leaked out the white house was seeking $750 billion for the 2020 pentagon budget. a shocking figure when just last week the president said $700 billion was his top line. weeks before the president demanded a 5% cut from all government agencies. it s been to rebuild the military after years of budget cuts and caps. this year s defense budget is $716 billion. the pentagon was hoping for $733 billion for the 2020 budget. some political insiders have argued the president s choice of $750 billion is a negotiating tactic to get to that number of $703 billion and we ve just heard the president tweet that if congress does not build the wall, the pentagon will do it. so it is clear that he is putting that number of $750 out
about military spending, and those who have said maybe the military is too big, politically they don t want to be vulnerable to the charge that they are anti-military. so the political system has allowed these weapon systems that we don t necessarily need that are often way over budget to be getting built without much restraint. and their personnel costs are soaring at the same time. yeah, anything that could ever be seen to be weakening america is definitely something that carries with it a lot of political risk. something else that s been called the third rail of american politics on more than one occasion, particularly during election years, social security. let s put up the graphics on this. the budget for social security we ve got the wrong graphic up here. if we could put the correct graphic up, it says $703 billion in 2015, then we can put up the other one, it goes negative, 2037, we re going to need to cut benefits 22% in order to stay solvent. couple of proposals out there