Obama Planning to Slash Defense Budget
Fox News is reporting that Barack Obama has asked the military’s Joint Chiefs for Staff to cut the defense budget by 10% for FY 2010. This is an unfortunate “request” given the massive expenditures being planned in virtually every other area of the budget.
These proposed cuts are not a good idea for national security purposes, needless to say. Neither are they good from an economic stimulus perspective. Some economists, including Martin Feldstein of Harvard, say that defense spending is one of the best ways to ensure that stimulus money hits the economy quickly.
Writing about the trillion dollar stimulus package, Jim Manzi says:
the net effect of this bill is to shift the distribution of U.S. government spending as a whole away from defense and public safety and toward social programs: for good or ill
This is a Democratic dream and, as I predicted, the inevitable result of voters being gullible enough to vote the entitlement party into control of the presidency and both houses of Congress.
It’s time to get on the phones and blow the dust off of your typewriters, folks. Contact your congressman and senator and make sure they know that you want the defense budget to, at a minimum, remain static when adjusted for inflation.
h/t Doug Ross
This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.
Comments are closed.
PoliGazette Comments Policy
PoliGazette encourages comments from all viewpoints, especially those that disagree.
Comments submitted must, however, adhere to the following standards. Comments that violate
these standards may be edited or deleted without notice at the sole discretion of the editors.
Commenters who repeatedly or egregiously violate these standards or who attempt to argue
publicly with editors regarding the comments policy may be banned from commenting further.
(1) Comments should address the substantive content of the post. Comments that repeatedly
or blatantly misrepresent the content of the post or of others' comments are not welcome. Comments that
respond to something other than which the contributor or commenter may have said are irrelevant and should
not be posted.
(2) Comments should avoid vulgarity as well as racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual bigotry.
(3) Comments should not personally attack the character, personal integrity, or professional
reputation of any PoliGazette contributor or of other commenters.
(4) Comments should reflect the contributions of the commenters themselves and should not
include extensive cut-and-paste reproductions of others' words except insofar as necessary to supplement
the commenter's own arguments. Link spam, trackback spam, and propaganda spam will be instantly deleted.
(5) Public figures are considered open to all substantive criticism of their policies and statements.
Comments that present objectively false factual information about public figures (i.e. "Obama is a Muslim") or
that attack public figures by attacking their families are not welcome. Comments that merely repeat
slogans for or against a candidate without engaging in substantive comment are not welcome.
Questions or challenges to these policies or their application should be directed to the editors
by email only.
A few things…
1) The Pentagon’s budget (not including expenditures for Iraq and Afghanistan) has grown from $316B in 2001 to $536B in 2009. This represents a 70% increase. So a 10% decrease is funding will take us from $536B to $483B, which is still more than the $463B the Pentagon had for 2007. All Obama is doing is preventing the budget from growing an average of 10% year after year when there’s no discernible advantage to doing so.
2) Obama has said consistently that ALL government agencies will see cuts, but the military budget is the biggest so that has to be one of the first to be addressed.
3) The United States spends more than the next 40+ countries combined in defense spending. How that’s tolerated by our taxpayers is beyond me, but I’d imagine they’d like a little of that money back at a time like this, wouldn’t you?
But to the broader point of this post, I think it would be refreshing to see these cuts being characterized as something other than an ideological win for the Dems. Cutting back right now makes sense because our current budgets aren’t sustainable.
In other words, if McCain had won the election and was proposing these cuts, what would this post say? Would you call Republican voters gullible? Would you tell people to contact their congressional reps or senators?
AS I think the closest anyone can claim to being an expert on the defense budget around here, I’m going to chime in agreeing with Pres. Obama. The defense budget has become unnecessarily and unsustainably bloated. A 10% reduction is probably just a first step.
Not every reduction leads to weakness. We simply need to make smarter choices about how and where we spend defense dollars. The time for buying everything in sight is way past over.
Nicely put, Jason. (Credit where credit is due)
Good facts from Justin too. Thanks.
Plus, remember that the declared budget doesn’t include supplementary amounts for Iraq and Afghanistan or the defense spending spread around other departments like Energy (nukes) and Homeland Security. Add it all up and its closer to $1 trillion, or over half of all government spending.
And no, defense spending is not good stimulus spending unless you work for a neocon think-tank. If it were, increased spending since 9/11 – almost a trillion a year – would have had a far more noticeable effect on GDP. Lets face it, we’ve had tax cuts for the rich and defense spending out the wazoo. If they were effective as stimuli to rescue the nation from depression, the economy wouldn’t be in this state to begin with.
Gratuitously obsolete ideological swipes at “neocon” devils aside, I would stop short of sweeping statements that defense spending is never good stimulus. Remember, the Great Depression was NOT ended by the New Deal, but by the massive upsurge in manufacturing demand that resulted from the U.S. entry into the Second World War.
A more accurate way to put it would be to say that THIS kind of defense spending would be bad stimulus. It worked in WWII because it was spending for massive new construction, resulting in second- and third-order demand from suppliers and resource producers like miners on the Iron Range in Minnesota. Post-modern defense spending is not resource-intensive nor does it produce volume manufacturing demand. Its ability to stimulate economic activity is therefore just as limited as most other forms of government jobs (i.e. teachers).
The real problem with current defense spending is that far too much is spent on frankly nothing. I can’t exaggerate the kind of waste I saw when I was managing a government IT contract and my other years of experience indicate that such waste was typical, not an exception. And Congress insists on spending billions on weapons systems like the V-22 that the military doesn’t even want and can’t use. Add to that the waste of buying 4+ redundant next generation fighter aircraft (when no country in the world is able to take on the F-15 or F-16 as yet) and boondoggles like stealth frigates and new nuclear submarines, and it should not be hard to find 10% of fat to cut.
Diff’rent strokes for different folks I guess. I guarantee that if this were a Republican administration, other areas would be cut first. Medicare and the like. And different people would be whining.
The fact is that both more or less said everything would be looked at. If there are things to cut out, they should be cut.
So are you agreeing? If so, it would be nice to see another post stating that since you needlessly painted Dems as ideological for targeting the massive waste in the defense budget.
One thing I will correct is that only Obama said everything would be on the table. McCain said that he’d enact a “spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.” And while that’s not the same as saying he wouldn’t eventually cut money from Medicare or defense, I think it’s a good rule to go by what McCain said as opposed to guessing would have happened had he won. Fair?
Justin, exactly what else is being cut? Last I heard there was a $800B+ package on the table that would cost another $300B before it has run it’s course. Take the “stimulus” package off the table and a military cut is certainly more palatable. Only then can the defense cut be taken as a real cost-cutting measure. As it stands, the bloated spending package is filled with ideologically targeted expenditures outweigh the savings a military cut would provide. In other words, no, I don’t agree.
I can agree with Jason here even though generally I believe in a strong defense. Waste in any area is something we just can’t afford, and the stories of wasteful defense spending are legendary.
The problem I have with it though is that the 10% cut is happening in defense right away, while Obama’s promise to make surgical cuts everywhere seems to be a pipe dream right now (in fact it feels suspiciously like the Dem Congress is going for the money grabs now to avoid the political necessity of showing restraint in the normal budget process later.) Education is one area in particular where the hypocrisy and ideology show through; everything we’ve said about defense spending is just as true for federal education dollars (we’ve had episodic doubling of education spending and instead of producing measurable improvements we continue to see declines in education metrics and then that’s used as a rationale for MORE spending.)
On the defense cuts specifically, if they will target the high tech weapons systems and perhaps coapt some of McCain’s suggestions about contract oversight, then that makes sense. I think in a stimulus bill like this, given our recent overstretches of manpower, it would make sense to do those things alongside an INCREASE in funds for recruitment, salaries, and benefits- so that there’d be a net neutral effect on the budget or perhaps even a net increase but shift toward personnel instead of weapons.
Justin, since you run a blog that has multiple contributors, you have no excuse for not noticing when one contributor writes something and another contributor disagrees with them.
It would also be nice if you could manage to comment without giving orders as to what we are supposed to say and/or not talk about. Tend to your own garden.
I’m sorry I’ll be accused of being “knee jerk” but it just sounds so classically….well… Democrat to increase spending for jobs, healthcare, … and to cut defense spending. (And I know I’ll get beat up for that remark: “So what’s so wrong with spending more on jobs…”)
If we are going to “surgically cut” defense shouldn’t we “surgically’ increase spending on jobs, healthcare etc. I don’t get a strong sense that that’s happening.
I happen to see things logically. We’re talking about our National Security here being at serious risk. We’re still in a time of war, regardless of what some may want to call it. And I don’t care what anyone tries to argue. Making Massive cuts in the Naval Force or any branch of the Military in a time of war is not only reckless, but it is irresponsible and wrong.
President Obama is talking about anywhere from 25% all the way to 50+% or more of the Naval Sailor force. You tell me what’s wrong with this picture. That’s more then an estimated 6 million sailors who would lose their jobs, their life security, their income and livelihoods all for what? Cutting the Defense Budget Spending in war times? You gotta be kidding me. This is absolutely ridiculous and insane.
No offense to this new President. But does he have any clue in that mind of his about what that’s going to do to us as country and Economically? I don’t think he does. I honestly don’t. Nobody with a common sense frame of mind would think of doing such a thing so downright stupid and off the wall. I’m not trying to insult the President here, but he’s gotta get the head screwed on straight, or the United States is going to be in Serious Trouble if his planned Naval Cuts go through.