Let's see if other adminsitrators follow suit. www.cnn.com/2011/POLITICS/01/06/pentagon.budget.cuts/index.html?hpt=T2
Good. Now let's see the equivalent levels of cuts in entitlement spending, and we're well on our way to restoring some level of fiscal sanity.
Sangre, Know of any politicians who have specifically mentioned Social Sec or health care (medicaid etc.) as a target for cuts? I think Ron Paul is one. But RP isn't a majority of the House and Senate.
1. Any Pub would be an idiot to cut defense spending and not cut entitlement spending. That is not how negotiations work. 2. IMO, both defense and entitlements are massive sink holes with limited return on investment. 3. We sure could save a lot of money by pulling out of Afghanistan. How is that going?
Brilliant. Let's cut our military's size and funding while China, and it's 1 billion people, continue to increase and modernize theirs. America stands to be the first great empire in world history who fell because we CHOSE to essentially commit suicide as a nation. This is yet another example.
The problem with Defense Spending, is not the Spending per se, it is the procurement process. Numerous times through history almost all appropriations have gone through one committee. Which funneled all spending through one spicket. The last time was before WWII. Now we have multiple committees responsible for approptiations, multiple spickets. That is the problem with the spending by this government, there are too many Congressman that have direct control over apprpriations. We need the money to come out of one spicket instead of 50 different spickets. Yes, it makes some Congressman more powerful than others and some committees more powerful than others but hey this is a danger close situation. I wouldn't want my Congressman doing anything with appropriations, but he definately should have something to say about the healthcare laws/bills Medicard/Medicare in this country. Congressman Dr. Burgess.
China isn't stupid enough to attack us, and they don't need to. At this stage of the game, a lot of the benefits of military strength are tallied in the knowledge that one side would win. Deference is profitable; slaughter is not. Our position as it stands now is rapidly weakening because we are losing access to the two things that made us so dangerous before: oil and money. Our oil production peaked in 1970, Canada in the 1990s and Mexico in the past 5 years. The Middle East is a free for all with a rapidly expanding Chinese influence. At the same time, we are killing the international faith in the dollar, which was what allowed us to print the money that funded our military-industrial complex. So when we discuss defense spending as though the Chinese are waiting to strike, we are sowing the seeds of our own demise. They won't do a thing until we can't afford to fight back, and then they'll only do enough to show us who's boss without actually damaging their ability to intimidate other competing nations (i.e. India and Russia). They may send a supercarrier to the bottom as a defensive maneuver, but they aren't going to nuke Tokyo or Taipei. Their coup would be seizing Taiwan unharmed and then daring the US to do something about it. Thus the enormous importance of developing domestic renewables and sound currency, both of which are directly harmed by increased defense and entitlement spending. War is bloody expensive and the DoD uses ~20mm bbl/day. The one positive thing that I expected from BHO (and he has done good things that I didn't expect) was an exit from Iraq and Afghanistan, and he has made a hash of it.
