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Budget Sanity, Anyone?

Submitted by producer on Thu, 02/10/2011 - 12:55
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Speaking with a veteran Pentagon watchdog yesterday, I was struck by the irony that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs' warning that we are jeopardizing our national security by spending too much on our national security, was not just being overlooked by the press, but is being wilfully ignored by those fired-up freshmen patriots in charge of our purse strings in the House.

I heard a very earnest and principled freshman Tea Partier on NPR explaining why he chose not to take advantage of the Congress's healthcare plan because it came from the evil government, but now he was being gouged by the health plan he's been forced to buy in the private market. His honest answer was we have to get government out of the healthcare business and the first way to reduce costs was tort reform. So it's the trial lawyers who are causing us to spend 16% of our GDP with the worst healthcare outcomes in the industrial world, not big pharma and big insurance? 

 
But today promises to be a beam-me-up day because we will be looking at the new Republican budget designed to address the national debt crisis that Admiral Mullen warned is a national security risk. So we cut a million dollar mohair subsidy, and red line every silly-sounding liberal indulgence as well as zeroing out that subversive underwriter of dangerous non-corporate speech, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and we're king of the hill.
 
Reality check!!! 
 
You're only playing games with 12% of the overall budget. Shrinking the incredibly shrinking prime cuts while leaving the rump of defense and entitlement spending alone. What kind of hollow shell-game is this when you ignore the startling fact that we are spending $707 billion on defense today, that is higher than any time since World War II, more than all of our possible enemies combined, and almost as much as the rest of the entire world?  When we had a real enemy the Soviet Union, who could have wiped us all out in 30 minutes, our Cold War spending averaged $440 billion and that includes the Korean and Vietnam wars. So here we are chasing a few hundred hopeless fanatics in some caves in Pakistan in an endless war against a tactic, not a real military adversary, and nobody asks why? 
 
Ideology is obviously a great comfort to our fearless freshmen, otherwise they would have to deal with the real world and that's hard work. So let the follies begin as more public money gets shovelled into a few private hands. That's the real shell-game on Capitol Hill that's being played in the name of shrinking government. 
 
And who is writing the hymnal that is being so faithfully followed by the freshmen? Chuck and Dave - those billionaire boys the Kochs. You're doin' a heck of a job boys, and once you've got rid of pensions, Social Security, Medicare and public broadcasting, you'll be able to get on with the real project of Americans for YOUR Prosperity, the return of slavery. After all, wages are a cost. And costs hurt profits. And that's not good for free enterprise.