Last week, President Obama put in a request with Congress for $83.4 billion in extra military spending this fiscal year.  That’s about $850 per U.S. family or $270 per person.

The Bush Administration was big on making supplemental spending requests for the military even though many military expenditures were entirely predictable and could have been planned for in the normal budget process. The New York Times covered the new spending request here.

The bill to approve this spending hasn’t been introduced yet. We’ll feature it here when it is so you can let your Member of Congress know what you think about it.

The one nice thing about supplemental spending requests is that they let us do nice discrete calculations of what’s going into military spending, but planning for military spending in the regular budget process is probably best.