It seems that the Debt Supercommittee is doomed to fail, which doesn’t actually surprise a lot of people. (If you don’t understand what the Supercommittee is, see “Layman’s Terms: What Does The Debt Supercommittee Failure Mean?“) The United States government is still showing an extreme unwillingness to make hard choices about its debt. The Supercommittee only needed to come up with cuts of $1.2 trillion over 10 years, or an average of $120 billion a year from a deficit of over $1 trillion of a budget in the neighborhood of $3.5 trillion. The members of the Supercommittee couldn’t even agree on a way to trim roughly 5% of our overall budget – cuing lots of political posturing about whether we should blame the Republicans for not accepting enough tax increases or the Democrats for not accepting enough cuts.
But at least we have the “automatic” cuts that kick in since the committee didn’t find a better way to come up with those numbers, right? It’s still a tiny amount in the scheme of the overall budget. It still amounts to a slowed manner of growth rather than legitimate cuts. It still leaves us with an enormous deficit and growing debt. But at least the government has tricked itself into finding a way to save $1.2 trillion, right?
Maybe. Those “automatic” cuts aren’t supposed to kick in until 2013. That gives the government more than twelve months to find another way around them. A 10% cut to the Pentagon’s budget next year will still leave it with expenditures almost as large as the rest of the world combined, but there’s already talk that Congress may try to block the cuts amid Republican hysteria that these “devastating” cuts will cause “the dismantling of the greatest armed forces in history.” Presidential candidate Romney has been “calling on President Obama to block looming military cuts.” Call me a cynic, but I fully expect the government to find a creative bipartisan way to delay the hard choices yet again.
That’s what I was surprised and cautiously encouraged to hear that Obama has “vowed to veto any effort to undo the roughly $1 trillion in across-the-board cuts.” In the same article, Rand Paul provides evidence that these cuts aren’t really cuts, anyway: “This may surprise some people, but there will be no cuts in military spending because we’re only cutting proposed increases. If we do nothing, military spending goes up 23 percent over 10 years. If we sequester the money, it will still go up 16 percent.” But, hey, at least it’s some sort of clamp on the runaway spending…. if Obama helps ensure that it actually happens. A sixteen percent increase on the largest military budget in the world still seems a little excessive to me, but what do I know about billion dollar jet programs and fancy pensions for retired military personnel?
Twelve months is a long time. Obama may change his mind, and even if he doesn’t, the next president might. It’s very hard to guarantee anything about a budget ten years in the future. But real cuts for the year 2013 is a good place to start. The military budget used to be an untouchable political element; it was one area where Republicans had no qualms about spending loads of government money. But things are finally changing. After explaining the efforts of defense hawks to maintain the existing budget, the article says that “deficit-cutting tea partyers in the GOP are siding with liberal Democrats in signaling they’re ready to allow military reductions.”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for spending good money to protect our nation. But it’s simply preposterous to propose that we can’t cut 10% out of that enormous budget next year – or restrain a 23% growth over 10 years to 16% – without that being “a threat to the national security interests of the United States.” Do we really still need over a thousand troops in a dozen different countries? Or can some of these countries, you know, actually pay for their own stability instead of getting a free subsidy from us? I believe our military budget is bloated and full of both overall waste and entire areas of unnecessary spending, and I believe that any shift in the ability to touch that spending will increase our national security by helping us trim the deficit and keep our interest rates at a sustainable level. We’ll see what happens.
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