A simple way to reduce the federal budget deficit.

Great Debates
1

As the federal budget deficit has ballooned over the last couple years, people have started taking notice and floating proposals for dealing with it. The more intelligent commentators, however, seem to be in general agreement that there’s not much possibility for serious reductions. A couple months ago President Obama speculated about a freeze on increasing non-defense discretionary spending, yet calculations showed that it would only achieve a small portion of the necessary reductions. Yet as I see it, there’s an easy way to chop the deficit by almost half in a way that won’t hurt anybody or reduce the effectiveness of the federal government.

Just consider the fact that Obama was careful to include the word “non-defense” in his proposed freeze. Almost everybody, be they Democrat, Republican, or miscellaneous other, simply assumes that we won’t even be looking at national defense when we consider what cuts to make. But consider how much we spend on defense. This pie chart tells the story: 59% of the discretionary budget. And this graph shows that since the late 90’s defense spending is the portion of the budget that’s really been growing out of control, up 5-7% in most years. With numbers like that, I think it’s clear that we’re not going to cut the federal budget unless we’re willing to cut defense spending. So my proposal is this: cut national defense spending by a lot, in the arena of 90%. Fire most of the military, close most of our bases including all of our overseas bases, bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, cancel all military pork barrel projects, and eliminate those parts of the military that haven’t served any purpose for generations (submarines for instance). I anticipate some possible objections, so let me tackle those first.

Objection 1: If we don’t have a powerful military, other nations will attack us.

Untrue. Some nations have no military and experience suggests it helps avoid invasion. Costa Rica, for example, is one of the few Central American nations that hasn’t had a war or invasion in the past 60 years. Scores of other nations have only a very small military yet are never worried about invasion. There’s no nation on earth that has any scenario for invading the USA even if they had a chance to do so.

However, if we grant for the sake of argument that we need a powerful military to repel invasions, my proposal allows for that. Right now, the USA is responsible for almost half of worldwide military spending. Even if we cut back by 90% we’d still have the largest and strongest military in the world. The three nations that are #2, #3, and #4 in military spending are Britain, France, and Japan, who are our allies. Clearly we have nothing to fear.

Objection 2: We need a powerful military to promote our national interests abroad.

Untrue. Our military hurts our interests abroad. Our military misadventures in the Middle East have made America less popular worldwide. Our useless bases in locations like Japan are very unpopular with the locals, especially when one of our servicemen rapes a local women. Trim the military and we’d become more popular with nearly everybody.

Besides, those who think we need military muscle to advance our causes are simply stuck several generations in the past. The issues which dominate international politics these days are trade, global warming, currency, etc… An intimidating military force simply doesn’t help with these issues.

Now for the advantages of my proposal.

It will save a lot of money. Not only will we save money on the defense spending itself, but also in other areas. With fewer soldiers today we’ll have fewer veterans tomorrow and thus we’ll spend less on veterans affairs, which currently eats up another 4% of discretionary spending.

It will prevent wars. As long as we have a military capable of invading foreign countries, some people will be tempted to do so. In the current situation, the only check against ill-conceived wars is the President’s decision-making abilities. With a smaller military, the next Dubya wouldn’t be able to start a war even if he wanted to.

It will make us a better nation. Our current militarization isn’t only bad because it leads to death overseas, squanders money at home, and makes us unpopular. It also bleeds into our characters and has negative effects in other ways. Trimming the military and building a new foreign policy based on cooperation would change us for the better.

2

Or we could just legalise pot :slight_smile:

3

Why not both? :smiley:

4

I agree 100%. In particular, it only makes sense to spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined if we’re planning on fighting the rest of the world combined. I say, we make a list of all those countries that are our really good, reliable allies-- Western Europe, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc., you can leave off allies of convenience like Saudi Arabia-- and then spend as much as everyone else combined. That’d still leave us as the baddest mofos on the planet, with plenty of overkill left over, but it’d be a pretty hefty savings from what we’ve got now.

5

Nice idea, but good friggin’ luck fighting the influence that the military has on U.S. lawmakers.

6

I agree. What I don’t understand is the republicans complaining bitterly about the cost of health care reform but supporting two wars that would fund HCR twice over. It’s like they are willing to cover the cost of killing people but not saving people from dying. Baffling.

7

The sad reality is that military spending has become an entitlement program, spread out over every congressional district in the US.

Ammo, guns, trucks, uniforms, tanks, planes, bombs, and missiles are line items on a spread sheet that each correlate to a specific town some where in Middle America.

To cut any one of those means going into a town and telling them you’re about to cut their only source of income. Good luck with that.

To make things worse, as the cost of equipment increased, they started spreading around the wealth. Now a bomber has a component built in just about every state. Trying to cut the program means convincing essentially every Congressmen and Senator that their town is about to lose it’s only source of income.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan meant a huge build up of federal funds flowing into these towns. And now you want them to stop building what ever it is they build? No chance in hell. You’re more likely to see two new wars created as a replacement than you are to have that funding cut off.

8

When you say you want to cut the military budget by 90%, what specifically do you mean?

Are you going to discharge 90% of the soldiers currently under arms? What are you going to do with the various ships, APCs, tanks, jeeps, missiles, and so forth, to be decommissioned? How about all the jet planes and so forth?

I wonder what the effect might be of the sudden discharge of all these people into the work force. Might even affect the unemployment rate - do you think?

Not to mention that we spend somewhere around twice as much on entitlements and interest on the national debt than we do on defense. So, as I think you realize, this is not a realistic solution long-term.

Regards,
Shodan

9

Oh Beavis Christ, I agree with Shodan.

Won’t firing a tons of soldiers dump a bunch of unskilled (in some cases at least) laborers into the market?

How about the large stockpiles of ammo & guns?

What will be done with bases overseas? How about bases here?

10

I come from a military family, but I have to heartily agree with the OP. The time for that kind of military is over.

I think we should particularly cut our massive ground forces. We simply shouldn’t be getting into the kind of wars of occupation that we’re now facing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Get rid of our foreign bases.

I disagree about submarines (in part)—I think we should retain our ballistic missile submarines as part of our nuclear deterrent. For surface ships, we shoul focus more on the small destroyer-level and Coast-Guard type craft, which are useful in our international contributions to combating piracy and policing illegal trade (as in nuclear materials, etc.).

I think there’s nothing wrong with maintaining a small complement of long-range bombers, so that we can still hit missile sites/bunkers/etc. should someone go nuclear and get belligerent halfway around the world.

Other specific thoughts?

11

I love how proponents of cutting military defense spending always portray it as a massive program based on its share of “discretionary spending.” What this really means is that after building up titanic entitlements, they arbitrarily cut that out fo the things they’ll like from the pie, and then…

Oh well, I have the comfort of knowing that they’d be the first to scream bloody murder once they find they can’t accomplish anything abroad. And they’d probably blame us on the other side of the aisle.

12

Absolutely. I think generational change (a 20-year timeframe) is what we should aim for. After all, the deficit is not an immediate crisis problem, despite what the Tea Party folks would like to believe. (In the short run, the deficit is keeping the still pathetically weak economy going.) The deficit is a long-term problem, and the solutions can apply over long-term timescales to avoid massive disruption.

13

Sure we’ll need to scale back gradually to avoid the shock of a sudden demobilization, but in the long run it will make the country stronger and more prosperous.

Military spending is inherently wasteful. If the government spends money on projects (like road building or eduction) the benefit is two-fold. It benefits the people who do the work, but it also has knock-on effects (making transportation cheaper, creating a more educated workforce) that boost the economy beyond the initial spend.

Military spending doesn’t work that way. It immediately benefits the soldiers and defense contractors, but without the long-term tail. If we’re at peace the soldiers and weapons sit idle – a waste of resources that could be used elsewhere. And if we’re at war the soldiers tend to get killed and the weapons get used up. Either way, the defense dollars don’t contribute anything to our long-term prosperity.

Now, obviously we need some level of defense. Buy anything more than the minimum we need to defend ourselves is a wasteful drag on the economy. Instead of spending money on building weapons that will sit idle or blow up, we could be spending it on schools, or bridges, or manufacturing plants, or scientific research … things that would actually strengthen the country in the long run.

14

Accomplish what? Killing people? Trust me, I won’t be heartbroken over the lack of deaths from wars.

15

Trying to accomplish things abroad is one of the problems this would solve. When you’ve got a military that’s bigger than you need for your legitimate purposes, you start looking for illegitimate purposes to use it for. That’s what got us into Iraq.

16

This isn’t exactly the way it works, though. Comparing “dollars we spend” versus “Dollars theyspend” is a fool’s game. For one thing, the dollars spent by a Western military get you fewer soldiers for the simple reason that you have to pay them more. An American private’s paid as much as ten Pakistani privates.

What you have to do is say

  1. What military capabilities do we want to possess?
  2. What would that cost?

The USA isn’t spending almost half the world’s military budget because there was a conscious decision that went along the line of “Hey, let’s spent as much as the rest of the world combined.” They’re spending all that money for political reasons; to accomplish overseas adventures, create projects in the districts/states of influential Congresspeople, to placate inter-service rivalry issues, for large scale political reasons, and to some extent because government inertia makes it hard to cut costs.

What military the USA needs to spend money on is entirely dependent upon what defensive capabilities the USA wants. “Fighting the rest of the world” could amount to nothing more than having a fleet of ballistic missile submarines with the standing policy that if someone attacks the territory of the USA, the USA will respond with nuclear weapons. That’s both affordable and immediately possible, since the fleet of subs already exists, but it’s politically impossible and potentially dangerous - it’d be a huge paradigm shift, at least.

On the other hand, maybe the correct amount is about what’s being spent now. Maybe it’s more. Maybe it’s less. Maybe the USA should never have gone into Iraq but should spend a bazillion dollars on ABM technology. Maybe less money should be spent on smart weapons and more money on armored vehicles, or less money on fighter jets and more on satellite reconnaissance, or less on the endless search for a new infantry rifle and more on encrypted man-portable communications. Smarter people than I would be able to figure that stuff out.

I’m simplifying things, of course, because in developing a military capability of X you also have to account for things like having the infrastructure in place to scale up to Y if the need arises, or long term capital expenditures and weapons and platform development, but you see what I mean.

17

I assume y’all would be OK with us not being able to do anything like Gulf War I. Thus leaving someone like Saddam Hussein in control of Kuwait. And Saudi Arabia sometime after that.

Regards,
Shodan

18

Objection 3: A large percentage of the federal defense budget goes to paying service men and women, for their benefits, housing, etc, and paying for retirement benefits and such for former veterans. Another large chunk pays simply for maintenance of equipment, refurbishment, maintenance and so on. Another chunk (not so large) pays for research and development which enables the US to maintain our edge in weapons technology.

So…I don’t see how you could reasonably cut any of the above, at least not right away. Maybe you could reduce the number of US personnel (assuming we get out of Iraq and Afghanistan) over the course of years or a decade or so, which will reduce those costs. But really, what are we talking here? A cut of $50 billion a year? $100 billion? $300 billion (a little less than half the current budget? :dubious:)?

-XT

19

And why do I care which brutal, oppressive regime is selling us oil?

20

As to this, it would if you were stupid enough to fire them all on Monday. In the long term, cutting back through attrition and a slow rate of discharge, it’d make no difference at all. The people added to the workforce would be available to do and create other sorts of work, and the money spent to employ them would not have to be taxed/borrowed by the government.

The armed services is not an economically logical solution to unemployment, or else the current unemployment problem would have been solvable by simply hiring a few million soldiers.

In 2010 U.S. military spending is expected to be somewhere around $900 billion, including base expenditures, special expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and supplemental spending bills. That’s $300,000 for every single person in the U.S. armed services, including National Guard. That’s one hell of an expensive jobs program.