But this is military spending and even though the Navy isn’t in need of too many ships for Iraq or Afghanistan, we apparently need to prepare for yet more wars of the future, even if it means going deeper into debt, just as we’ve done with the unfunded wars still raging after nine long years.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t understand why this spending is treated so differently by our self-proclaimed budget hawks than the federal money that was going to fund a new rail line between Milwaukee and Madison to link with the rest of a Midwest high-speed rail corridor of the future.

Obviously, it’s good that Wisconsin will be getting some federal money for its workers in the northeast part of the state, but it also would have been good for some 4,000 construction workers to have jobs for the next couple of years in the southern part of the state, financed with federal money.

If the Scott Walkers of the world really had any principles, they would have insisted that the Marinette Marine money be returned even if it would have gone to shipbuilders in Louisiana, just as they returned the rail money so that it could be given to states like Florida, Illinois and California.