We can not cut our way to fiscal sanity. We need to raise revenue. That means we have to go to where the money is. It has gone up to the extremely wealthy . Their taxes have to be raised. Loopholes have to be closed. Corporations actually have to pay taxes.
Anything else is blowing smoke.
I think it is fundamentally dishonest - a cheap shot, and silly, IOW - to dismiss resistance to the notion of cutting defense as nothing but machismo, and lobbying.
And you don’t think Norway’s buttload of oil revenue has anything to do with it? It is entirely because they don’t spend much on their military?
Your own cite disagrees with you -
This is ridiculous. Social Security and Medicare and entitlements growth is the basis for the coming crisis. Trying to deal with that with defense cuts is like dealing with a forest fire by putting out the match that started it - it doesn’t help.
If you are talking about reducing the deficit, why are you bringing up things that don’t reduce the deficit?
Be that as it may, the military is not government make-work. It actually fulfills an important function of government. The fact that you can’t see that means that you are unqualified to discuss what can be cut in order to balance the budget. People keep pointing out that defense does not constitute nearly as much of the federal budget as entitlements, and growth in entitlements is much faster than growth in military spending. Yet you keep changing the subject and claiming that we need to cut spending on defense, because Norway has oil money.
Sorry, that’s dumb.
Regards,
Shodan
I’ll go one further–that’s an idiotic, totally moronic summary of what I said, not just a dumb one. Fundamentally dishonest my left foot.
Why?
:shrugs:
You’re the one who put Norway forth as an example of what you thought would happen. If pointing out that your own cite says it was oil money that allows them to do what they do makes you pitch a tantrum, there’s nothing I can do about that.
You never responded to Simplicio’s graph showing that defense as a spending priority has been decreasing for decades, and you made no effort to refute xtisme’s point about the effects of laying off hundreds of thousands of military people. I’m sure Greece spends a lot less on their military than the US - how is that working out for them?
You can’t just wave your hands and say “It should be easy to cut the military by 75%”. It isn’t. Even if it were, it would not solve the problem.
Regards,
Shodan
Given that the tantrum, along with every other one of your summaries of my posts, exists entirely in your fevered imagination, I disagree: you’re the only one that can do anything about what you’re imagining.
No, I am afraid I disagree. I can’t make you respond to the graph, I can’t make you respond to xtisme’s point about layoffs, I can’t make you respond to the point about Norwegian oil money.
Regards,
Shodan
Sure, you disagree-but not with me. You disagree with someone who’s entirely a figment of your imagination, since I never said you could do those things. It’s kind of fascinating to watch you talk to Bizarro LHOD, but only kind of.
I’ve enjoyed reading this thread, and don’t have too much to add other than what little I’ll share here. Even the conservative figure the US Government goes with is that it is 20% of the budget for the military. That to me is high. However the Center for Defense Information (CDI) reports it at 51%. The Friends Committee on National Legislation says 43%, and the War Registers League claims 54%. See chart below.
I’ve often wondered what parallels our military spending shared with the Soviet Union. And I do feel like many countries are getting a free ride by basically letting America take on the huge load. No other country seems to think they need these huge military budgets either to protect their borders and interests, and this includes the oil producing nations.
If this chart is correct, America actually pays out about 1.5 trillion dollars (2009) annually to support this huge military, not often the 650 billion (2009) or so annual figure that gets reported. That starts to play a higher percentage of the GDP, still short of the old Soviet Union days, but still about double of what many think it is. Also pay attention to their chart of US military spending vs the world.
If America wants to get serious about budget cuts, it needs to start at military spending. If Europe and other allies of ours don’t feel like they need a huge military budget, why should the US? It could be I don’t get it, but the Democrats are talking about wanting to cut 10.5 billion out of the entire budget to reduce the deficit, while the Republicans want to cut 61 billion for this year. Big deal, they still both want this huge military. We are running about a 1.6 trillion dollar deficit now, so how does either cut make a hill of a beans difference?
Pardon me while I wet myself laughing at your chart.
The War Resister’s League? Come on.
Regards,
Shodan
That’s fine, grab you another set of Depends while you continuing pissing all over yourself. But their figures are much more in line with the CDI and FCNL, all showing over double of what our military is actually costing us instead of the 20% figure often cited.
Per CATO:
http://www.downsizinggovernment.org/defense
Defense: 20%
Social Security: 19%
Medicare: 13%
Medicaid: 7%
Interest: 5%
All Other: 36%
Defense as a share of GDP:
1900: 1.0%
1950: 5.7%
2000: 3.0%
2011: 5.0%
Despite Shodan’s hilarity, the War Resister’s League makes an important point: Social Security is funded via social security taxes, not through general federal revenue. It doesn’t really make sense to combine it with all expenditures as long as it’s funded separately.
They also make an excellent point that it’s grossly deceptive not to include special expenditures for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the federal budget.
Whether it makes sense to include other aspects of military spending (e.g., payment on debt incurred via military spending, veteran’s benefits, etc.) is debatable.
Not really true. During the 1991 Gulf War the US deployed 6 of the then 14-strong carrier fleet to the Persian Gulf, and the Red and Arabian Seas.
Cite: http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/gulfob.htm
Under normal conditions, no more than 2 carriers would be on an overseas deployment at a time, but I’m not convinved we need more than 2 overseas at a time. We certainly don’t need a carrier in the North Atlantic at all times and we haven’t needed one there since more than half the Russian Navy rusted away or was sold for scrap. The common places the US needs carriers are the Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea, Mediterranean, and West Pacific. I can see how one might make an argument for 9 carriers based on this, but I think you’re missing the larger point:
In a climate of budget-cutting the US needs to re-evaluate the strategy of fighting simultaneously a war in Iraq and Afghanistan, aerial intervention in Libya, and troops deployed on various missions in many different countries.
I believe that from a deficit reduction standpoint, we need to look to these goals by the 2015-2020 timescale:
All troops gone from Iraq
All troops gone from Afghanistan
Reduce the number of troops and bases in Europe
A strategy to reduce US military involvement in any crisis in the MidEast (which will require significant movement towards energy independence in the US, as well as in Japan and Europe)
I’m a little unclear on who exactly you think will attack us if we have 6 carriers instead of 11? Even by 2020, we would still have more carriers than Russia and China combined, and the addition of the other NATO fleets would make our superiority more pronounced.
As long as there’s a profit in building aircraft carriers, we’ll be able to convince someone to build them. I doubt buying extra carriers as some sort of make-work program is economically efficient. The shipbuilders and their allies in Congress will always say this, but they never seem to back it up with evidence.
xtisme mentioned the example of the British before World War I, and their choices are relevant here. The British decision to abandon the Two-power standard for capital ships was an acknowledgement that their financial resources were not infinite, and we may need to make a similar acknowledgement. As strong as the US economy is, it cannot support over $700 billion (in 2006 dollars) in military spending indefinitely.
We are in 1920s America when the Gilded Age and the income disparity came crashing around our feet.
Social Security is funded by money out of your paycheck. It is not part of the budget and should be removed from your equations. It can not contribute to the deficit. If it can not meet its obligations in 30 years, it will have to cut back to 80 % , to keep from spending more than it takes in.