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The Budget
Thanatos
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So, old news first: John Kyl is a piece of shit:
I would like to say that this means the budget supercommittee is done, but in reality, what it probably means is that the Democrats are going to capitulate, and give Kyl exactly what he wants: a budget free from defense spending cuts. I'm sure Murray and Baucus will be tripping over themselves to write the Pentagon a blank check, just so they can look "bipartisan." But hey, at least we know that we're never going to run out of $15 billion jets that won't ever see any actual combat.
Of course, their negotiations haven't even really begun yet, so maybe this is just posturing on Kyl's part. Somehow, I doubt it.
Washington (CNN) -- Sen. John Kyl, one of the members of the special congressional committee set up to create a $1.5 trillion budget-reduction plan, said Thursday those cuts should come out of programs like Medicare and Social Security -- not defense.
The Arizona Republican told a luncheon event by conservative groups the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation that the defense budget has been cut enough already, most recently this summer when the debt-reduction deal meant up to $400 billion in defense cuts.
"Defense should not have any additional cuts," said Kyl, who also told the group that he would quit the special committee rather than consider further defense cuts..
"In a $3.5 trillion budget -- two-thirds of which is entitlements -- there is enough slop in the system, that you can find $1.5 trillion in savings without deeply cutting into benefits or totally readjusting how these programs work, although they will require some adjustment," Kyl added.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, told the group that the debt-reduction deal -- which created the special committee -- "is a philosophical shift that I'll have no part of."
"What I'm not willing to do as a Ronald Reagan Republican is put on the table cuts in defense that would say to the country and the world at large (that) defense is a secondary concern when it comes to Washington spending. This pisses me off beyond belief," Graham said.
Freshman Rep. Allen West, R-Florida, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served in Operation Desert Storm as well as in the more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he saw first-hand during the budget reductions that followed the fall of the Soviet Union what defense cuts can do to the military.
"When I was a battalion executive officer, we (would) have to start budgeting toilet paper in barracks. We have folks, friends of mine, that were in armored units that could not go out and practice tank tactics. They had to use golf carts to practice tank tactics, because, number one, we couldn't afford the fuel. Number two, we couldn't afford the spare parts," West said.
He said he is worried that the United States isn't paying attention to possible future threats. "Egypt, Syria, Libya are going to cause new security concerns and strategies that the United States of America has to be able to contend with," West added.
But even some of the Republican lawmakers who spoke passionately about protecting the Defense Department from more cuts admitted that there is room for some careful trimming.
"How do we buy weapons? The more it costs, the longer it takes, the more you make, is silly. So we need procurement reform," Graham said. "We've got to look at a retirement system where people live to be 80, you retire at 38, even though you served your country well. I'm willing to do big things."
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, said she agrees that there are ways to trim the Defense Department budget without risking national security. "A third-year law student could negotiate better contracts on behalf of the United States of America than some of the contracts I have seen where we are doing procurement on behalf of our country," she declared.
The urgency of having the special committee find $1.5 trillion in budget cuts is that otherwise the debt deal requires that huge cuts called "sequestration" kick in automatically to programs including defense and Medicare.
But both Graham and Kyl pledged that they would do their best to stop the mandatory across-the-board budget reductions.
"I would do my best to see that it never took effect; in other words, that we would waive it," Kyl said. "This is one where we would have to waive, and so I would do my best to prevent sequestration on defense."
Graham said, "Let everybody pay a little bit if we can't get our act together in Washington, and not take it out of the hide of those doing the most to defend us."
I would like to say that this means the budget supercommittee is done, but in reality, what it probably means is that the Democrats are going to capitulate, and give Kyl exactly what he wants: a budget free from defense spending cuts. I'm sure Murray and Baucus will be tripping over themselves to write the Pentagon a blank check, just so they can look "bipartisan." But hey, at least we know that we're never going to run out of $15 billion jets that won't ever see any actual combat.
Of course, their negotiations haven't even really begun yet, so maybe this is just posturing on Kyl's part. Somehow, I doubt it.
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Yes, there is no way that they're using ALL that money! Surely we can cut this bitch right in half without any issues whatsoever. *brushes hands* It'll be quick and clean and painless... for the people who matter.
Look, just put an extra couple billion into law enforcement and putting all those soldiers who aren't posted overseas to work here in America and I'm sure the rioting and spikes in violent crime will barely be noticable behind our mansion walls and private security teams.
Like it or not, the big budget problems of the future are Social Security and Medicare and something actually has to be done about it, the sooner the better.
Not to sound callous, but for this topic you really can't work with "helping the poor and elderly is more useful to the nation than defense spending" assumption as a given. And it's not just defense, going forward we're going to need to divert money from many sources to entitlement, or increase taxes to pay for entitlement, or both.
Ultimately we need to decide just how important these things are to us, weighed against the other things we could be spending the money on.
You use the tools you have to build better tools, which can build still better tools and so on. Things become obsolete only when they've successfully been used to make better things. Also we've had people arguing that technology has achieved such a point that we can now implement social utopia for well over a century at least. I'd rather keep going.
Lastly, I think Greece counts as an example of "investing in a country's people" backfiring. It's laughably convenient when the social welfare state boogieman is actually a real place.
Edit: I'd be on board with taking Social Security and Medicare money and putting it into education though. That's investing in the people in an incredibly useful way.
Yea, I mean 43% of the federal budget is just slop. We can do without that!
Really makes me want to audit any financial operation he's ever been a part of.
right now military contractors have a vested interest in taking forever to finish things andthere's no political pressure on them to be efficient.
The Greeks problems were spending money that wasn't their own, but guess what they were spending it on. It certainly wasn't the military. The Eurocrisis thread was full of details, and a pretty neat article from vanity fair of all places, that outlined the craziness in that country.
I concede that we could slack for a while and still be ahead of the game in any conflict, but why? The whole idea is to make these hypothetical conflicts as one sided as possible. It's essentially "world" peace (for the west) simply because no one can possibly hope to fuck with the US (and so, by extension any NATO member state). Considering the history of constant conflict that even Europe experienced among themselves this just seems like a really nice status quo to maintain.
Even the quote from the opening post completely agrees with you there, I don't think anyone is thinking of that when they mean defense budget cuts.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
Is it not the rest of the world anymore? Recently it was the rest of the goddamn planet.
We give them pathetically small bumps in their budget every year, and the ROI on that is about 4.5 to 1. Yes, that's right, for every dollar we spend on the IRS, we get back $4.50. That's per year. I mean, obviously, we wouldn't be able to keep that up if we were to infuse them with a bunch of money. But I see no reason not to, say, increase their budget by 50%. Only $6 billion. And I think we could expect a solid 1.5:1 return on that.
Hypothetical conflicts with who, exactly?
The Cold War has been over for a long time and there's no nation-state that seriously considers that taking military action against the United States or NATO states would be a great idea if only we didn't constantly shovel money into military R&D.
Aliens.
Duh.
There's no nation-state that seriously considers that military action because of the spending. Before the US became a superpower there was a great deal of conflict among western powers and afterwards a great deal of peace. The Cold War created a cool situation where everyone is in an alliance under the umbrella of US intervention and even though the USSR is gone I like the stability of the US as a "world police". We haven't grown up into some kind of Star Trek Federation where the West is just beyond going to war with each other, it's all influence and threat of force.
I'd say that the threat of nuclear annihilation is a far more effective way of preventing low-level regional conflicts from escalating than military spending itself.
No, but we have grown into a society where our weapons have become so devastating that noone can really consider serious action against any world power no matter the discrepancy in force if they think anyone will do anything about it. You don't need trillions of dollars of weapons when one cruise missile can incapacitate a city for a week.
There's a lot we wouldn't nuke for that we would do a conventional war for though. Semi-recently Russia invaded Georgia and no one really cared. No one would care if Russia invaded Poland for the umpteenth time either, except that they joined NATO in 1999, well after the Cold War ended (and whatever common defense clause the EU has, no idea how serious that is).
There's just a great advantage in being able to win any hypothetical conflict, anywhere in the world, trivially. The superpower thing is really much nicer than being first among many great powers.
Even the diehard military supporter congressmen in the opening post's quote agree that things need to be done more efficiently, and outside of the people making $texas (or getting re-elected) based on the corruption you describe no one is going to argue against getting the same planes for less money.
Yea but people develop defenses against weapons, it's a constant evolution. What may seem like science fiction today could be a reality tomorrow (satellite based lasers blowing the cruise missile away while dropping a kinetic kill vehicle to sink the destroyer that launched it?) and that's what I really love about throwing money at the military, so much cool shit is developed and gets spun off for the rest of us. I mean even the goddamn internet we're using now to argue about this began as a DARPA project.
I have compassion for the poor but I just really don't want the projects to help them out to come at the expense of a Defense budget that leads to the development of future technologies and (IMO) creates global stability. It already seems crazy that we're going to spend half the government's budget on entitlement programs.
Yeah man, you can't cut money out of DHS. Nobody even knows why it exists.
Let's assume that the United States could, in reality, trivially win any hypothetical conflict anywhere in the world. This assumption will ignore historical evidence, the military might of several other developed nation-states, and the fact that most of the countries America would find itself in conflict with have nuclear weapons.
You're still weighing hypothetical benefits against actual ones. Saying we should cut social security benefits because otherwise Batman won't be able to beat up Dracula isn't a compelling fiscal argument.
We could save a lot of money just winning two hypothetical conflicts, trivially, right now.
Like, today.
So much money wasted by not just winning those conflicts, trivially, as all this money we're spending is supposed to allow us to do.
....but fuck NASA. Nothing important in space at all. We don't need any of that!
The fucking uselessness of it all is astounding.
Come Overwatch with meeeee
I'd love to give money to NASA, I've even said as much earlier in this thread, but it's not feasible, your best hope is from the military. Want a new spaceplane? The Boeing X-37 began as a NASA project but DARPA is actually making it happen.
Also the problem with using Iraq and Afghanistan as examples is that we won the wars a long time ago, it's the occupations that are a hassle. Trouncing Saddam's and the Taliban's forces was truly trivial, it's the nation building we engaged in that took years.
Well I've already replied to this but just to make sure, remember when Bush had his photo op on the aircraft carrier? "Mission Accomplished"? That, the like two weeks of fighting, was us trivially winning the conflict. We then proceeded to ask the military to go ahead and design a new country for the Iraqis while being the police force that prevents them from killing each other, which SURPRISINGLY they're not really suited to doing.
We could have withdrawn after Bush's photo op and left the Iraqis to fight a civil war though. Trivially.
I'm pretty sure the F-22 completely dismantles all of your arguments in their entirety. That and the fact that I don't see anyone invading China despite the bulk of their military being obsolete by US standards.
And to address a straw man you have seemingly inserted into there without realizing it: None of us are saying DARPA needs to get axed, we're saying we don't need things like the F-22 and the F-35. We should be investing heavily into defenses for current and future weapons technology. We should not be building fleets of planes that will never get used.
so that's not a great idea