War & Peace Quote by Donald Evans

The sentence performs the classic Washington two-step: acknowledge pain, then pre-justify it as inevitable. Evans isn’t really explaining deficits; he’s narrating them into acceptability. The phrase “understanding that yes” signals a preemptive concession, the kind that implies any dissent is a failure to “understand” rather than a legitimate policy dispute. It’s an invitation to nod along.

The subtext is triage. “Protecting our homeland” and “prosecuting a war” are framed as twin, non-negotiable imperatives, positioned above the usual budget politics. Once spending is wrapped in national security vocabulary, the moral weight shifts: deficits become less a consequence of choices and more a weather system you endure. That move matters because it launders causality. “Committing more resources than we thought we might be” suggests surprise, almost innocence, as if the scale of spending emerged organically rather than from aggressive strategic commitments and the political popularity of wartime resolve.

Contextually, this lives in the post-9/11 era, when rhetoric about security carried unusual cultural authority and when the Bush administration’s economic messaging often tried to reconcile expansive military and domestic security spending with tax cuts and a pro-growth brand. “A period of deficits” is especially telling: temporizing language that treats red ink as a brief, manageable phase, not a structural outcome. The intent is reassurance, but the craft is deflection: deficits are framed as the price of vigilance, and asking hard questions about the bill risks sounding like you’re haggling over safety.