Article linked below.
Once again the famously conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board is not pleased with the current republican leadership in the House of Representatives.
For discussion is this something to make democrats/liberals happy? Scared? Worried?
Personally, it worries me. I am fine with policy debate but it seems even conservatives are worried what will come from this House.
On the one hand, going after the sacred cow that is unchecked Defense Spending is probably not a bad thing. On the other, if anyone could screw this up, it’s these morons.
There is no shorter route to political expatriation than going after the defense industry. As much as defense spending should be curtailed and redirected into efforts that actually improve national security like sustainable energy development, infrastructure improvement, education and universal child welfare, infectious disease surveillance, climate adaptation, et cetera, actually getting broad support in Congress by elected official whom even if they don’t take money from defense contractors are buoyed by the jobs they bring to their districts and states is like proselytizing at a strip club. This is just a stunt by Republicans to claim that they are ‘doing something’ about the debt that they know won’t go anywhere and to be able to legitimately argue that ‘the other guys’ are stopping them.
Stranger
They’ll only “go for it” in the sense of funnelling it into their own pockets.
If they were serious about reducing Federal spending, they’d figure out how to knock back some of the mandated spending (i.e. Medicare, Social Security, tax credits, Medicaid, etc…) as it consumes something like 70% of the entire Federal budget. Hell, refundable tax credits alone is comparable to defense in total spending, never mind Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.
Defense spending by comparison is a paltry 10% or so. Let’s not pretend that defense is some sort of massive budget golem eating a particularly large part of the Federal budget, because that just isn’t so.
The difference is that Medicare, Medicade, and Social Security all achieve critical goals that benefit our society, whereas that’s true of some, but DEFINITELY not all, of the defense spending budget.
I’m just saying that if they were serious about reducing spending, they could probably wring 5% out of that 70% that’s mandatory spending a lot easier and with a lot less heartburn, than trying to wring 2% out of the 10% that is defense spending.
Defense appropriations fall under the category of “discretionary spending” and hence are readily curtailed by just modifying the budget, whereas Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid would require explicit legislative action to modify. From a practical standpoint, going after entitlements for retires is basically deep-throating the muzzle end of a double barrel shotgun because retirees vote in large numbers and regardless of ostensible ideology they are pretty much a unified block in terms of protecting those entitlements. If going after Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, et cetera is political suicide, telling ‘older adults’ that you’re taking away the benefits they have been promised for decades is an electoral holocaust for whatever party is pushing it.
Of course, with the upside down demographics, those mandatory expenditures are only going to grow and disproportionately with the number of workers contributing to the tax base. So it is an issue that has to be worked out in some fashion, either by more corporate taxation (hah!), reducing discretionary spending elsewhere in an attempt to compensate (ugh!), or…the Soylent Green solution? And the United States is far better positioned than most developed nations like China, Japan, Russia, Central and Southern Europe, et cetera, which will experience massive demographic collapse sometime in the next two to three decades.
Anyway, this is all just a cynical ploy to make it seem like the GOP is being held back by venal, self-serving Democrats (not far wrong even if that is the kettle accusing the pot of being trop noir). Nobody is cutting anything except the non-defense discretionary like education, transportation, and the sciences because the Republican model for the future of the nation is modeled on India.
Stranger
Which part of the defense budget, specifically, is ripe for trimming though? It sounds like one of those things that everyone hates in aggregate, but can’t single out a particular slice for cutting, unless perhaps it’s simply imposing harder price caps, such as forcing Boeing to deliver tankers for a little bit less price than before, but that contract is already written and signed.
Anything such as paying soldiers lower wages, or cutting training hours, or giving the Air Force less fuel, or mothballing half the Navy fleet, is going to be a big PR no-no.
Yeah, I know it’s discretionary and the other stuff isn’t.
But it feels to me like when people screech bitterly about defense spending, they’re often coming at it from some sort of perspective like defense is some truly huge proportion of the total Federal budget, and like the other stuff is dwarfed by it. But in fact, defense is something like 1/5 the size of Social Security.
And I’m also left scratching my head when people want to ADD a bunch more entitlement programs, when we already have something like 40% of our population not actually paying taxes and receiving money from the government, and 70% of our Federal budget is mandated spending for social programs.
Is that still true? As baby boomers retired, it increased the ratio of retirees to workers. As they die off, the ratio will start coming back down. Is that starting to show up in the numbers yet? The baby boom started almost 80 years ago.
What is the average age of Americans, and when will (or did) that number reach its maximum and start coming back down? When do we reach peak geezerhood?
But again, you’re completely ignoring what the money is used for. Medicare, medicade, and social security ensure that our people don’t starve in the streets or die of preventable illness. Only a very small portion of what we currently spend on defense is actually used to defend our citizens from their enemies. Too much is spent on things like Iraq or Afghanistan. What did the American people gain from their investment in these foreign wars? Is America safer now that both countries are falling apart and hotbeds of extremism?
Now, certainly, we could save money on the necessities. For example, eliminating our for-profit system of medical insurance in favor of a single payer system would save us billions, for example. By no means should cutting defense spending mean we give up on health care reform. But just because we waste money elsewhere doesn’t mean we should be throwing away good money after bad by continuing our ludicrously high defense spending.
Thing is, I have explicitly paid into Social Security and Medicare that came with a promise of future care.
If it is to be taken away the government needs to write me a check for a few hundred thousand dollars plus interest. That is not about not liking how my tax dollars are spent, that is refunding me a line item on my paycheck that I have put in for the past 35+ years that came with a promise.
I think the military is a different thing when discussing this.
For starters, we could remove most of our ability to project force abroad. That’s not defense, that’s offense, and the only thing having that capability does for us is tempt us into using it unwisely.
This is just false. Maybe you mean “income taxes”? Because something like 80% of the population pays payroll taxes (SS and Medicare). Those are the programs you’re talking about cutting.
Somehow, most of the rest of the world devotes a much smaller portion of their GDP to defense spending. I bet we could follow those leads. We spend 3.48%, the UK spends 2.2%, India (with a hostile neighbor) 2.6%, even Ukraine was less than us, at least until 2021. I imagine it’s higher since the invasion.
I mean, strictly speaking, America doesn’t need much defense. Aside from terrorism, it’s not like anyone is ever going to invade America. If we were all about defense, not offense, we could eliminate every single aircraft carrier, submarine, etc. We could become essentially nothing but a glorified Border Patrol.
95% of the purpose of the existence of the US military is to do abroad things such as defending NATO-Europe if Russia attacked, or Japan/South Korea if North Korea attacked, etc.
Certainly the United States could openly declare that it’s no longer intervening in anything abroad. Then we’d see massive nuclear proliferation (South Korea, Japan, Poland, Taiwan, etc. would probably all immediately develop nukes,) probably a significantly more aggressive China, a lot of other spill-on effects. Whether that would be worth the money saved from cutting the military budget that way, would be its own topic.
Does military aid count as “defense spending?” Because I can totally see the Howler Monkey Caucus going after aid to Ukraine in the guise of cutting spending.
Next you’ll be telling us we don’t really need a “Space Force”.
I actually suspect Ukraine is the entire motive.
The GOP doesn’t seem to realize that the moment it is no longer perceived as the party that supports “the men and women in uniform,” it will have lost one of its last few bastions of remaining support.
The GOP has been dumping on veterans for years and they still keep voting for them.