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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.