I knew this guy couldn’t tell the truth from the minute I heard him speak.

Romney has been rewriting the past. He has repeatedly given a bogus description of recent history by accusing former President Clinton of initiating a decline in military spending.

Romney: After President George H.W. Bush left office, in 1993, the Clinton administration began to dismantle the military, taking advantage of what has been called a “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War (July/August issue of Foreign Affairs).

Romney: Following the end of the Cold War, President Clinton began to dismantle our military. He reduced our forces by 500,000. He retired almost 80 ships. Our spending on national defense dropped from over 6 percent of GDP to 3.8 percent today. He called it a “peace dividend” (Frontiers of Freedom, April 18, 2007).

This is untrue. The peak in defense spending that Romney speaks of was in the Reagan administration. It is not correct to say that the Clinton administration began to cut U.S. military forces. No matter how you measure defense spending, President George H.W. Bush had significantly trimmed it by the time Clinton was sworn in. And it was Bush’s administration, not Clinton’s, that first boasted of a “peace dividend.”

Measured in what economists call “constant dollars,” adjusted for inflation, defense spending declined by nearly 15 percent between Reagan’s last budget (for fiscal year 1989) and the elder Bush’s last budget four years later. The decline was just under 13 percent between Bush’s last budget and Clinton’s final fiscal year (2001). In other words, the buying power of the dollars spent for defense declined more during Bush’s four years than during Clinton’s eight.

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