By PAUL KRUGMAN
August 01, 2011 "NY Times" -- A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.
For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.
Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.
The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.
Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.
And then there are the reported terms of the deal, which amount to an abject surrender on the part of the president. First, there will be big spending cuts, with no increase in revenue. Then a panel will make recommendations for further deficit reduction — and if these recommendations aren’t accepted, there will be more spending cuts.
Republicans will supposedly have an incentive to make concessions the next time around, because defense spending will be among the areas cut. But the G.O.P. has just demonstrated its willingness to risk financial collapse unless it gets everything its most extreme members want. Why expect it to be more reasonable in the next round?
In fact, Republicans will surely be emboldened by the way Mr. Obama keeps folding in the face of their threats. He surrendered last December, extending all the Bush tax cuts; he surrendered in the spring when they threatened to shut down the government; and he has now surrendered on a grand scale to raw extortion over the debt ceiling. Maybe it’s just me, but I see a pattern here.
Did the president have any alternative this time around? Yes.
First of all, he could and should have demanded an increase in the debt ceiling back in December. When asked why he didn’t, he replied that he was sure that Republicans would act responsibly. Great call.
And even now, the Obama administration could have resorted to legal maneuvering to sidestep the debt ceiling, using any of several options. In ordinary circumstances, this might have been an extreme step. But faced with the reality of what is happening, namely raw extortion on the part of a party that, after all, only controls one house of Congress, it would have been totally justifiable.
At the very least, Mr. Obama could have used the possibility of a legal end run to strengthen his bargaining position. Instead, however, he ruled all such options out from the beginning.
But wouldn’t taking a tough stance have worried markets? Probably not. In fact, if I were an investor I would be reassured, not dismayed, by a demonstration that the president is willing and able to stand up to blackmail on the part of right-wing extremists. Instead, he has chosen to demonstrate the opposite.
Make no mistake about it, what we’re witnessing here is a catastrophe on multiple levels.
It is, of course, a political catastrophe for Democrats, who just a few weeks ago seemed to have Republicans on the run over their plan to dismantle Medicare; now Mr. Obama has thrown all that away. And the damage isn’t over: there will be more choke points where Republicans can threaten to create a crisis unless the president surrenders, and they can now act with the confident expectation that he will.
In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.
Showing posts with label US Budget Deficit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label US Budget Deficit. Show all posts
Monday, August 1, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
Tax Cuts for the Middle Class and Poor STIMULATE The Economy, But Tax Cuts for the Wealthy HURT The Economy
by Washington's Blog
July 28, 2011
Extreme conservatives push for tax cuts ... but just for the wealthy.
Both extremes are wrong.
Spending was $5.6 trillion higher than the C.B.O. anticipated for a total fiscal turnaround of $12 trillion. That is how a $6 trillion projected surplus turned into a cumulative deficit of $6 trillion.
If you want to talk about redistribution, there it is.
The New York Times reported in 2007:
Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.
The study, by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, also shows that tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available, while rates for people at the very top continued to decline.
Based on an exhaustive analysis of tax records and census data, the study reinforced the sense that while Mr. Bush’s tax cuts reduced rates for people at every income level, they offered the biggest benefits by far to people at the very top — especially the top 1 percent of income earners.
The Economic Policy Institute reported in June:
The Bush-era tax changes conferred disproportionate benefits to those at the top of the earnings distribution, exacerbating a trend of widening income inequality at a time of already poor wage growth.
The top 1% of earners (making over $620,442) received 38% of the tax cuts. The lower 60% of filers (making less than $67,715) received less than 20% of the total benefit of Bush’s tax policies.
The Bush-era tax cuts were designed to reduce taxes for the wealthy, and the benefits of faster growth were then supposed to trickle down to the middle class. But the economic impact of cutting capital gains rates and lowering the top marginal tax rates never materialized for working families. Inflation-adjusted median weekly earnings fell by 2.3% during the 2002-07 economic expansion, which holds the distinction for being the worst economic expansion since World War II.
This isn't complicated. Rampant inequality largely caused the Great Depression and the current economic crisis. Cutting taxes on the middle and lower classes reduces inequality and stimulates the consumer economy. But cutting taxes for the wealthy reduces aggregate consumer demand.
As economics professor Robert Reich notes:
First, the rich spend a smaller proportion of their wealth than the less-affluent, and so when more and more wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of the wealth, there is less overall spending and less overall manufacturing to meet consumer needs.
Second, in both the Roaring 20s and 2000-2007 period, the middle class incurred a lot of debt to pay for the things they wanted, as their real wages were stagnating and they were getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. In other words, they had less and less wealth, and so they borrowed more and more to make up the difference. As Reich notes:
Between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of private credit to the total national economy nearly doubled. Total mortgage debt was almost three times higher in 1929 than in 1920. Eventually, in 1929, as in 2008, there were “no more poker chips to be loaned on credit,” in [former Fed chairman Mariner] Eccles' words. And “when their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
And third, since the wealthy accumulated more, they wanted to invest more, so a lot of money poured into speculative investments, leading to huge bubbles, which eventually burst. Reich points out:
In the 1920s, richer Americans created stock and real estate bubbles that foreshadowed those of the late 1990s and 2000s. The Dow Jones Stock Index ballooned from 63.9 in mid-1921 to a peak of 381.2 eight years later, before it plunged. There was also frantic speculation in land. The Florida real estate boom lured thousands of investors into the Everglades, from where many never returned, at least financially.
Tax cuts for the little guy gives them more "poker chips" to play with, boosting consumer spending and stimulating the economy.
As Reich noted last year:
Small businesses are responsible for almost all job growth in a typical recovery. So if small businesses are hurting, we're not going to see much job growth any time soon.
On the other hand (despite oft-repeated mythology), tax cuts for the wealthiest tend to help the big businesses ... which don't create many jobs.
In fact, economics professor Steve Keen ran an economic computer model in 2009, and the model demonstrated that:
Giving the stimulus to the debtors is a more potent way of reducing the impact of a credit crunch [than giving money to the big banks and other creditors].
And as discussed above, Reich notes that tax cuts for the wealthy just lead to speculative bubbles ... which hurt, rather than help the economy.
Indeed, Keen has demonstrated that "a sustainable level of bank profits appears to be about 1% of GDP" ... higher bank profits lead to a ponzi economy and a depression. And too much concentration of wealth increases financial speculation, and therefore makes the financial sector (and the big banks) grow too big and too profitable.
No wonder Ronald Reagan's budget director David Stockman called the Bush tax cuts the "worst fiscal mistake in history", and said that extending them will not boost the economy.
July 28, 2011
Extreme conservatives push for tax cuts ... but just for the wealthy.
Extreme liberals are against all tax cuts, believing that we need higher taxes to pay for government programs ... and that taxes somehow won't create any drag on the economy.
In fact, tax cuts for the middle class and poor stimulate the economy, but tax cuts for the wealthy hurt the economy.
This is actually a very simple concept, although some politicians and economists unintentionally or intentionally muddy the waters.
As Ed Harrison notes today:
Bruce Bartlett, a Republican political appointee and domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan, points out that:
Taxes were cut in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2006.
It would have been one thing if the Bush tax cuts had at least bought the country a higher rate of economic growth, even temporarily. They did not. Real G.D.P. growth peaked at just 3.6 percent in 2004 before fading rapidly. Even before the crisis hit, real G.D.P. was growing less than 2 percent a year...
According to a recent C.B.O. report, they (Bush tax cuts) reduced revenue by at least $2.9 trillion below what it otherwise would have been between 2001 and 2011. Slower-than-expected growth reduced revenue by another $3.5 trillion (6.4 trillion).
Bartlett offers this killer chart as a summary of the numbers:
If you recall, it was George W. Bush’s father, GHW Bush, who, when campaigning against Reagan, called supply side economics’ claims that tax cuts pay for themselves Voodoo Economics. And Bush was proved right when deficits spiralled out of control and both Reagan and Bush were forced to raise taxes.
The Bush tax cuts accrued disproportionately to the wealthy. The Tax Policy Center shows that 65 percent of the dollar value of the Bush tax cuts accrued to the top quintile, while 20 percent went to the top 0.1 percent of income earners. If you want to talk about redistribution, there it is.
The New York Times reported in 2007:
Families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush’s tax cuts, according to a new Congressional study.
The study, by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, also shows that tax rates for middle-income earners edged up in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available, while rates for people at the very top continued to decline.
Based on an exhaustive analysis of tax records and census data, the study reinforced the sense that while Mr. Bush’s tax cuts reduced rates for people at every income level, they offered the biggest benefits by far to people at the very top — especially the top 1 percent of income earners.
The Economic Policy Institute reported in June:
The Bush-era tax changes conferred disproportionate benefits to those at the top of the earnings distribution, exacerbating a trend of widening income inequality at a time of already poor wage growth.
The top 1% of earners (making over $620,442) received 38% of the tax cuts. The lower 60% of filers (making less than $67,715) received less than 20% of the total benefit of Bush’s tax policies.
The Bush-era tax cuts were designed to reduce taxes for the wealthy, and the benefits of faster growth were then supposed to trickle down to the middle class. But the economic impact of cutting capital gains rates and lowering the top marginal tax rates never materialized for working families. Inflation-adjusted median weekly earnings fell by 2.3% during the 2002-07 economic expansion, which holds the distinction for being the worst economic expansion since World War II.
This isn't complicated. Rampant inequality largely caused the Great Depression and the current economic crisis. Cutting taxes on the middle and lower classes reduces inequality and stimulates the consumer economy. But cutting taxes for the wealthy reduces aggregate consumer demand.
As economics professor Robert Reich notes:
First, the rich spend a smaller proportion of their wealth than the less-affluent, and so when more and more wealth becomes concentrated in the hands of the wealth, there is less overall spending and less overall manufacturing to meet consumer needs.
Second, in both the Roaring 20s and 2000-2007 period, the middle class incurred a lot of debt to pay for the things they wanted, as their real wages were stagnating and they were getting a smaller and smaller piece of the pie. In other words, they had less and less wealth, and so they borrowed more and more to make up the difference. As Reich notes:
Between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of private credit to the total national economy nearly doubled. Total mortgage debt was almost three times higher in 1929 than in 1920. Eventually, in 1929, as in 2008, there were “no more poker chips to be loaned on credit,” in [former Fed chairman Mariner] Eccles' words. And “when their credit ran out, the game stopped.”
And third, since the wealthy accumulated more, they wanted to invest more, so a lot of money poured into speculative investments, leading to huge bubbles, which eventually burst. Reich points out:
In the 1920s, richer Americans created stock and real estate bubbles that foreshadowed those of the late 1990s and 2000s. The Dow Jones Stock Index ballooned from 63.9 in mid-1921 to a peak of 381.2 eight years later, before it plunged. There was also frantic speculation in land. The Florida real estate boom lured thousands of investors into the Everglades, from where many never returned, at least financially.
Tax cuts for the little guy gives them more "poker chips" to play with, boosting consumer spending and stimulating the economy.
As Reich noted last year:
Small businesses are responsible for almost all job growth in a typical recovery. So if small businesses are hurting, we're not going to see much job growth any time soon.
On the other hand (despite oft-repeated mythology), tax cuts for the wealthiest tend to help the big businesses ... which don't create many jobs.
In fact, economics professor Steve Keen ran an economic computer model in 2009, and the model demonstrated that:
Giving the stimulus to the debtors is a more potent way of reducing the impact of a credit crunch [than giving money to the big banks and other creditors].
And as discussed above, Reich notes that tax cuts for the wealthy just lead to speculative bubbles ... which hurt, rather than help the economy.
Indeed, Keen has demonstrated that "a sustainable level of bank profits appears to be about 1% of GDP" ... higher bank profits lead to a ponzi economy and a depression. And too much concentration of wealth increases financial speculation, and therefore makes the financial sector (and the big banks) grow too big and too profitable.
No wonder Ronald Reagan's budget director David Stockman called the Bush tax cuts the "worst fiscal mistake in history", and said that extending them will not boost the economy.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
The US Maxes Out Its Credit Card
Editor's NOTE:
Mr. Margolis is correct. The US maintains a "War Department" not a Department of Defense. It exists to ensure American and Western financial supremacy for the all-powerful multinational corporations. As such the US military is being utilized to build ever larger monopolies for the super-rich Plutocrats who now control the United States and Europe.
Bear in mind, these Plutocrats could care less about what happens to the United States or any other country for that matter. National boundaries are simply irrelevant to them. Should the US default, they will simply move elsewhere since the entire world is their oyster. They can live anywhere and their markets are global.
This means that the US military establishment actually exists for the benefit of the Plutocracy and therefore to the detriment of the poor and middle class even though it is the children of the impoverished by and large who make up the ranks of the armed forces. What a tragic irony that.
It should be obvious that in order for the United States not to default on its debt, the "War Department" must be slashed by at least 50%. It should be the absolute first order of business for the Congress. Unfortunately, the Executive and Legislative branches of government have been completely bought and paid for by the very Plutocrats who benefit most from the Empire which insures their wealth. Barring a massive populist revolt, nothing will change.
The United States must find a credible third party populist candidate who can bring this issue to the American public before it is too late. I nominate Jesse Ventura if he is willing to take on the challenge. He may be the only person with enough courage, understanding and name recognition to compete with President Obama and the Republican nominee in 2012.
The US Maxes Out Its Credit Card
By Eric Margolis
April 23, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --The US dollar sank further last week and gold hit $1,500 an ounce, frightening investors and destabilizing financial markets. A leading credit rating agency warned the US AAA rating might be downgraded.
While Rome burned, President Obama and the Republican-controlled US Congress traded childish taunts and hot air. Both parties refused to tell Americans the painful truth: government’s yawning $1.4 trillion US budget deficit had to be slashed to prevent a financial meltdown. That would mean pain for everyone.
But the two political parties are deadlocked: Obama’s Democrats want to raise taxes. Republicans demand tax cuts. They want to cut health, education and welfare, all three sacred cows to the Democrats, while increasing military spending when 40 million Americans draw government food aid.
This dishonest debate mostly ignores the 800-lb gorilla in the room: America’s bloated $750-900 billion annual military spending. Some experts put total annual US military and intelligence spending at $1.2 trillion.
Few American politicians dare suggest seriously trimming the Pentagon’s runaway spending.
The US National Priorities Project estimates that in 2011, out of one dollar of US federal spending, 27.4% is military; 21.5% health; 13.8% interest on the debt; 10.9% social security benefits; 3.5% on education; and 23% on everything else.
In 2010, US military spending exceeded by 50% the average spent in the Cold War years when America had a serious rival in the Soviet Union. Since 2000, US military spending has grown by 67% (all figures adjusted for inflation). Yet today America has no real military rival.
The US now accounts for almost 50% of world military spending. Add America’s wealthy allies in Europe and Asia, and the total rises to 80%. And yet Americans are incessantly barraged by wild claims their nation is under dire threat, the latest and most preposterous being that dirt-poor Myanmar (former Burma) is getting nuclear weapons. China, with a military budget only 1/10th the size of America’s, is the only future threat the Republicans can come up with.
Most Americans think of “defense” spending rather than calling it “military” spending. This gives the totally mistaken impression America’s shores are somehow being threatened by enemy invasion.
In reality, the Pentagon’s vast budget sustains US world military domination, with over 100 overseas bases, air and naval fleets, two wars, numerous smaller “police actions” in Africa and Asia, rented allies, and a strategic nuclear arsenal at least 75% larger than needed.
President George W. Bush waged two wars, cut taxes, and spent billions in farm and medical subsidies without funding them through tax increases or spending cuts. These costs were simply loaded on to America’s huge national debt. If American taxpayers had to actually pay for their $1.6 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, these conflicts would quickly end.
President Lyndon Johnson also financed the Vietnam War through debt. The result: a worldwide wave of inflation that took a decade to overcome. The same thing is happening today thanks to the profligate George Bush who doubled US government spending. The US has been exporting inflation around the globe by debauching the dollar and massive borrowing to finance its deficits.
Bush and now Obama’s unpaid-for wars, recklessly low US interest rates, commodity speculators, and China’s overheated economy are fueling the rising tide of world inflation.
The subject of modest cuts from the sacred cow of military spending is being timidly raised by politicians of both parties. But they are terrified of being accused of the ultimate sin in hyperpatriotic US politics, being unpatriotic and “not supporting our boys.”
Yet unless the Pentagon’s budget is cut – perhaps by as much as half or more – the US, dangerously top-heavy with debt, may capsize. History amply shows more empires done in by poor finances and debt than invasion by enemies.
Alas, America’s governing system, dominated as it is by such powerful special interests as the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and agriculture, can’t seem to escape from the national addiction to war and debt.
As my friend Arnaud de Borchgrave writes, while the US has spent $1.5 trillion on its Afghan and Iraq Wars, China is using US interest payments to win friends and customers around the world.
Mr. Margolis is correct. The US maintains a "War Department" not a Department of Defense. It exists to ensure American and Western financial supremacy for the all-powerful multinational corporations. As such the US military is being utilized to build ever larger monopolies for the super-rich Plutocrats who now control the United States and Europe.
Bear in mind, these Plutocrats could care less about what happens to the United States or any other country for that matter. National boundaries are simply irrelevant to them. Should the US default, they will simply move elsewhere since the entire world is their oyster. They can live anywhere and their markets are global.
This means that the US military establishment actually exists for the benefit of the Plutocracy and therefore to the detriment of the poor and middle class even though it is the children of the impoverished by and large who make up the ranks of the armed forces. What a tragic irony that.
It should be obvious that in order for the United States not to default on its debt, the "War Department" must be slashed by at least 50%. It should be the absolute first order of business for the Congress. Unfortunately, the Executive and Legislative branches of government have been completely bought and paid for by the very Plutocrats who benefit most from the Empire which insures their wealth. Barring a massive populist revolt, nothing will change.
The United States must find a credible third party populist candidate who can bring this issue to the American public before it is too late. I nominate Jesse Ventura if he is willing to take on the challenge. He may be the only person with enough courage, understanding and name recognition to compete with President Obama and the Republican nominee in 2012.
The US Maxes Out Its Credit Card
By Eric Margolis
April 23, 2011 "Information Clearing House" --The US dollar sank further last week and gold hit $1,500 an ounce, frightening investors and destabilizing financial markets. A leading credit rating agency warned the US AAA rating might be downgraded.
While Rome burned, President Obama and the Republican-controlled US Congress traded childish taunts and hot air. Both parties refused to tell Americans the painful truth: government’s yawning $1.4 trillion US budget deficit had to be slashed to prevent a financial meltdown. That would mean pain for everyone.
But the two political parties are deadlocked: Obama’s Democrats want to raise taxes. Republicans demand tax cuts. They want to cut health, education and welfare, all three sacred cows to the Democrats, while increasing military spending when 40 million Americans draw government food aid.
This dishonest debate mostly ignores the 800-lb gorilla in the room: America’s bloated $750-900 billion annual military spending. Some experts put total annual US military and intelligence spending at $1.2 trillion.
Few American politicians dare suggest seriously trimming the Pentagon’s runaway spending.
The US National Priorities Project estimates that in 2011, out of one dollar of US federal spending, 27.4% is military; 21.5% health; 13.8% interest on the debt; 10.9% social security benefits; 3.5% on education; and 23% on everything else.
In 2010, US military spending exceeded by 50% the average spent in the Cold War years when America had a serious rival in the Soviet Union. Since 2000, US military spending has grown by 67% (all figures adjusted for inflation). Yet today America has no real military rival.
The US now accounts for almost 50% of world military spending. Add America’s wealthy allies in Europe and Asia, and the total rises to 80%. And yet Americans are incessantly barraged by wild claims their nation is under dire threat, the latest and most preposterous being that dirt-poor Myanmar (former Burma) is getting nuclear weapons. China, with a military budget only 1/10th the size of America’s, is the only future threat the Republicans can come up with.
Most Americans think of “defense” spending rather than calling it “military” spending. This gives the totally mistaken impression America’s shores are somehow being threatened by enemy invasion.
In reality, the Pentagon’s vast budget sustains US world military domination, with over 100 overseas bases, air and naval fleets, two wars, numerous smaller “police actions” in Africa and Asia, rented allies, and a strategic nuclear arsenal at least 75% larger than needed.
President George W. Bush waged two wars, cut taxes, and spent billions in farm and medical subsidies without funding them through tax increases or spending cuts. These costs were simply loaded on to America’s huge national debt. If American taxpayers had to actually pay for their $1.6 trillion wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, these conflicts would quickly end.
President Lyndon Johnson also financed the Vietnam War through debt. The result: a worldwide wave of inflation that took a decade to overcome. The same thing is happening today thanks to the profligate George Bush who doubled US government spending. The US has been exporting inflation around the globe by debauching the dollar and massive borrowing to finance its deficits.
Bush and now Obama’s unpaid-for wars, recklessly low US interest rates, commodity speculators, and China’s overheated economy are fueling the rising tide of world inflation.
The subject of modest cuts from the sacred cow of military spending is being timidly raised by politicians of both parties. But they are terrified of being accused of the ultimate sin in hyperpatriotic US politics, being unpatriotic and “not supporting our boys.”
Yet unless the Pentagon’s budget is cut – perhaps by as much as half or more – the US, dangerously top-heavy with debt, may capsize. History amply shows more empires done in by poor finances and debt than invasion by enemies.
Alas, America’s governing system, dominated as it is by such powerful special interests as the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and agriculture, can’t seem to escape from the national addiction to war and debt.
As my friend Arnaud de Borchgrave writes, while the US has spent $1.5 trillion on its Afghan and Iraq Wars, China is using US interest payments to win friends and customers around the world.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
US Budget Priorities Reflect Power of MIlitary Industrial Complex
Editor's NOTE:
Given that the Obama Administration budget calls for $3.7 trillion in spending and the projected tax revenue is only about $2.1 trillion, the projected 2012 budget deficit is at least $1.6 trillion. Of note is that the combined US war and intelligence budgets (including the so-called "Black" budgetary items) exceed over $1.0 trillion annually. This represents 2/3's of the projected budget deficit for 2012. The obvious problem is that we are attempting to maintain an empire through armed force when as a nation we are close to being financially bankrupt. The power of the US military currently prevents our collapse. At what price however? We are caught in a vicious cycle in which ever larger military outlays are required in order to maintain the American empire the cost of which simultaneously drives us deeper into debt. It is totally unsustainable!
As the articles below indicate, at least $500 billion of that $1.0 trillion war/intelligence/security budget could be eliminated without damage to US National Security. The reductions recommended by Secretary Gates and accepted by President Obama are totally inadequate and indicate that there is currently no desire to significantly reduce US military/intelligence/security spending. Instead, President Obama and the Republicans in Congress intend to reduce the budget deficit by punishing those Americans least capable of enduring it that is, the poor, unemployed, underemployed, middle class, union workers, sick, elderly etc. That approach is not only economically unsound, it is patently immoral.
The fact that the elite media cooperate in labeling President Obama a socialist is evidence that it has abandoned rationality for rank sophistry in its loyal service to the "Regime." Given his actions to date, Barack Obama is behaving like a Republican by preferencing/benefiting the rich and powerful while abandoning the poor and middle class Americans who are largely responsible for his Presidency. This represents an unconscionable betrayal and must be recognized for what it is; a "sell-out" to the not so shadow government forces who now control our Regime.
The only way to save the United States is to radically reduce the size and cost of the ever expanding military/intelligence/security complex aka the "War Department" and its supportive infrastructure which presently consumes over half of all discretionary spending.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Obama budget projects record $1.6 trillion deficit
By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 14, 2011; 4:26 PM
President Obama rolled out a $3.7 trillion budget blueprint Monday that would trim or terminate more than 200 federal programs next year and make key investments in education, transportation and research. The plan is aimed at boosting the nation's economy while reducing record budget deficits.
MORE...
___________________________________________________
The Defense Department won the future, or at least the budget
By Ezra Klein
The Washington Post
February 14, 2011; 1:26 PM ET
One of the big lessons of this budget is that if you work in the federal government, you want Defense Secretary Robert Gates on your side when the budget cuts come around.
The military made out quite nicely in the 2012 budget proposal.
The administration is cutting $78 billion from the Defense Department's budget -- known as "security discretionary spending" -- over the next 10 years. That's a bit of a blow, but compare it to the $400 billion they're cutting from domestic discretionary spending -- that's education, income security, food safety, environmental protection, etc. -- over the next 10 years. And keep in mind that the domestic discretionary budget is only half as large as the military's budget. So if there were equal cuts, the military would be losing $800 billion. And you could argue that the politics of that make some sense: Military spending is one of the least popular categories of federal spending.
That's what the Fiscal Commission had wanted to do. "One of the Commission’s guiding principles is that everything must be on the table" they wrote. For that reason, they recommended "equal percentage cuts from both sides."
Nor were they the only ones who thought such cuts possible. The Sustainable Defense Task Force, formed by Barney Frank and Ron Paul (among others) and staffed by a who's who of military policy experts from both sides of the aisle, produced a report (pdf) recommending up to $960 billion in cuts over the next 10 years. These were cuts, the experts said, "that would not compromise the essential security of the United States." Others disagree with that judgment, of course. One of them was Gates, who warned that major cuts in his department would be "catastrophic."
He won. The $78 billion in cuts are the exact $78 billion in cuts Gates recommended. I bet there are more than a few Cabinet secretaries who wish they had that kind of power over the president's recommendations.
It's interesting to think about this in terms of the president's focus on "winning the future." He's been very careful to speak of our challenge as primarily one of bettering ourselves and our country, not fighting our competitors. To win the future, we need to educate our people, rebuild our roads, expand broadband Internet, invest in research and development. And some of those categories are, to be sure, getting a boost in this budget. But only a small one. The R & D budget, for instance, goes up by one percentage point. And many important programs -- like Pell Grants -- are getting shaved down.
If this is a fiscally responsible budget, then cutting $500 billion -- forget $800 billion -- from the Defense Department would've opened room for much more domestic investment. It also could've gone to pay down the debt. As it is, we're pumping that money into sustaining a fighting force that's orders of magnitude larger than anything retained by any other country. The theory implicit in that decision suggests that the fight to win the future might be rather different than the Obama administration is letting on.
____________________________________________________
The Breakdown: In an Age of Austerity, Can't the US Cut the Military Budget?
Christopher Hayes
The Nation
February 11, 2011
The US maintains the most expansive and expensive military on the planet. More than half of the annual budget goes towards "defense." But in the ongoing debates about the appropriate austerity measures to take, cuts to military spending have been insufficiently prioritized. On this week's edition of The Breakdown, D.C. Editor Chris Hayes and Institute for Policy Studies Research Fellow Miriam Pemberton discuss just how much the US could afford to cut Pentagon spending while maintaining its status as the dominant military force in the world.
Resources
Miriam Pemberton on the misleading nature of military spending "cuts" (article to follow below)
Center for American Progress article on reducing military spending (highly recommended)
Robert Dreyfuss discussing the "civil war" in the GOP over demilitarization
Barney Frank on cutting NATO spending: "It Serves No Strategic Purpose"
The Independent's Robert Fisk discusses the costs of war in the Middle East
_______________________________________________________
Military Spending Cuts: Depends on what the Meaning of 'On the Table' Is
By Miriam Pemberton
Institute for Policy Studies
February 10, 2011
Let's define budget cuts as spending less next year than this year. Nothing else should qualify.
Deficit pressure has put "everything on the table" for cuts, including the Pentagon. Everyone from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to President Barack Obama agrees on this. But what they mean by this is all over the map.
The budget Obama will present to Congress next week will likely begin what the Pentagon is billing as $78 billion in cuts to its budget over five years. In fact these are cuts to their plans for expansion, i.e., slowing a proposed increase is being defined as a cut.
While both Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan pay lip service to the "defense is on the table" mantra, both also exempt the defense budget from their budgetary restraining actions: a five-year discretionary freeze, in Obama's case, and $100 billion in cuts, in Ryan's.
The president’s debt reduction commission proposed real cuts, but these would leave the military budget only 5 percent below where President Reagan jacked it up to militarily defeat the Soviet Union — shortly before its collapse.
Defense Secretary Gates describes even those modest potential cuts as "catastrophic."
Let's define budget cuts as spending less next year than this year. Nothing else should qualify.
Savings aren't just needed because of the nation's massive debt. We also need to address our security deficit. The civilian and uniformed military leadership agrees on a key point: U.S. foreign policy needs to be less dominated by the military. Achieving that goal would entail decreasing the proportion of resources devoted to offense (the military) relative to defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military foreign engagement). IPS will score this proposed budget's mix of security expenditures, and report the results after Obama releases it.
_____________________________________________________
“Budgets,” Jim Wallis reminds us, “are always moral documents.”
John Nichols
The Nation
Barely a month after demanding that the Constitution be read into the Congressional Record, House Republicans voted against a motion to that would have protected against Patriot Act abuses of privacy rights. Then they voted to extend the act's surveillance authorities. The first test of that morality, explains the theologian who chairs the Global Agenda Council on Faith for the World Economic Forum, is how those with the least power, the fewest political connections and the greatest economic challenges fare. “Our budget should not be balanced on the backs of the poor,” says Wallis. “Cuts should not come from the services and programs that people rely on now more than ever. The reality is that we have a lot of wasteful spending in our federal budget, but most of it does not come from things that help the most vulnerable people in our society.”
So how does President Obama’s $3.73 billion budget proposal, which has as its takeaway line a promise to reduce deficits by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, fare on the moral test?
The president’s approach is far less draconian than was proposed last fall by the co-chairs of his deficit commission, who would have had the president consider processes of privatizing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Obama is not proposing to raise the retirement age or to cut the benefits available to those who reach it. At the same time, he proposes new education spending and some needed investments in high-speed rail ($53 billion over the next six years), building a nationwide wireless network ($15.7 billion) and establishing a national infrastructure bank ($50 billion) that would encourage investment in needed projects to create jobs.
All that’s got House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, sputtering about how the president “is abdicating leadership on that point.”
The president counters: “I’ve called for a freeze on annual domestic spending over the next five years. This freeze would cut the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, bringing this kind of spending—domestic discretionary spending— to its lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was President.”
But the way to a moral budget is not to try to strike some sort of balance between the Ayn Rand–derived fantasies of Paul Ryan and the reality that millions of American families rely on programs paid for by that “domestic discretionary spending” to survive.
The way to a moral budget is to assure that the most vulnerable Americans are protected. At the very least, it should place more serious demands of the wealthy and Pentagon contractors than on low-income and working-class households. The Progressive Chance Campaign Committee gets to the heart of the matter when it suggests: “Every proposed cut to necessary programs like Pell Grants and heating for low-income seniors needs to be judged in the context of the unnecessary tax cuts for Wall Street millionaires that passed at the end of last year.”
By that measure, the Obama budget—with its emphasis on domestic spending cuts that would would trim or terminate more than 200 federal programs in the coming year—fails some serious moral tests.
Among other things, the president’s proposed budget would:
• Cut $2.5 billion in heating assistance for low-income people.
• Cut $350 million from Community Development Block Grants.
• Save $100 billion over ten years by eliminating Pell Grants for needy students who want to take summer classes in order to finish their degrees sooner while allowing interest on graduate school loans to begin building up while students are still in school, meaning that the costs of getting an education will rise dramatically.
• Undermine an essential environmental initiative by cutting a quarter of the funding for the multi-state Great Lakes clean-up project. This project is especially important to so-called “rust-belt” cities where unaddressed pollution problems invariably poses the most serious health and safety threats to low-income and working-class neighborhoods.
The proposed cuts, coming just weeks after the president worked with Republican Congressional leaders to maintain Bush-era tax cuts for billionaires and to expand estate-tax exemptions for millionaires, drew a rebuke from Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over labor, health and education programs.
Referring to proposed cuts that harm low-income Americans, Harkin said, “There can be pain, but I want to make sure it’s not just on them. I want to make sure there’s Wall Street pain, there’s Pentagon pain, that there’s wealthy pain.”
There will be specific opposition to the $2.5 billion hit Obama proposes for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey, a top House Democrat, says the cut would “have a devastating effect on millions of American families.” Vermont Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy and Congressman Peter Welch declared that: “the last thing we should be doing is making it harder for the most vulnerable people in this country to stay warm in the winter.”
But it is perhaps even more unsettling to see a move to slash the far-reaching antipoverty programming that is maintained with the help of Community Development Block Grant funding. “The question is why? Why pick on this program?” asks David Bradley, director of the National Community Action Foundation, who warns: “Once the Obama administration throws a poverty program in the water, it starts a feeding frenzy.”
By doing that, Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, the second-ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said the Obama administration is letting Republicans like Ryan set far too much of the agenda.
“His people aren’t giving us a very wise set of choices. They’re cotton-balling rather than hard-balling,” explained Kaptur, who said of Obama: “He keeps waiting for Congress to save him. He ought to save himself.”
So what is available in the way of wise choices for balancing the budget?
Even conservatives such as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul say that it makes sense to look at the military budget. The Obama budget includes recommendations for a set of Department of Defense spending reductions that could reach $78 billion reduction by 2015. That sounds good. But the actual 2012 budget request for the Pentagon is for more than $550 billion—a 5 percent increase over what the Department of Defense spent last year.
As Lawrence Korb, the former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration who now serves as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, notes (writing with CAP’s Laura Conley): “In inflation-adjusted dollars, this figure is higher than at any time during the Bush years or during the Cold War.”
Instead of the spike in Pentagon spending, Jim Wallis argues that, to meet the moral test of budgeting, it’s “time to cut needless military spending. The Pentagon currently takes up more than half of our country’s discretionary spending. This does not include the billions spent on other military related expenditures or most of our spending on homeland security…. Reps. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) and Ron Paul (R-Texas) came up with a plan that they say would leave our country just as safe but save us $960 billion by 2020! Even with these cuts, we would still be by far the world’s most dominant military. When you list the countries in the world by order of their military expenditures, the United States tops the list and spends more than the next 13 countries combined.”
Given that the Obama Administration budget calls for $3.7 trillion in spending and the projected tax revenue is only about $2.1 trillion, the projected 2012 budget deficit is at least $1.6 trillion. Of note is that the combined US war and intelligence budgets (including the so-called "Black" budgetary items) exceed over $1.0 trillion annually. This represents 2/3's of the projected budget deficit for 2012. The obvious problem is that we are attempting to maintain an empire through armed force when as a nation we are close to being financially bankrupt. The power of the US military currently prevents our collapse. At what price however? We are caught in a vicious cycle in which ever larger military outlays are required in order to maintain the American empire the cost of which simultaneously drives us deeper into debt. It is totally unsustainable!
As the articles below indicate, at least $500 billion of that $1.0 trillion war/intelligence/security budget could be eliminated without damage to US National Security. The reductions recommended by Secretary Gates and accepted by President Obama are totally inadequate and indicate that there is currently no desire to significantly reduce US military/intelligence/security spending. Instead, President Obama and the Republicans in Congress intend to reduce the budget deficit by punishing those Americans least capable of enduring it that is, the poor, unemployed, underemployed, middle class, union workers, sick, elderly etc. That approach is not only economically unsound, it is patently immoral.
The fact that the elite media cooperate in labeling President Obama a socialist is evidence that it has abandoned rationality for rank sophistry in its loyal service to the "Regime." Given his actions to date, Barack Obama is behaving like a Republican by preferencing/benefiting the rich and powerful while abandoning the poor and middle class Americans who are largely responsible for his Presidency. This represents an unconscionable betrayal and must be recognized for what it is; a "sell-out" to the not so shadow government forces who now control our Regime.
The only way to save the United States is to radically reduce the size and cost of the ever expanding military/intelligence/security complex aka the "War Department" and its supportive infrastructure which presently consumes over half of all discretionary spending.
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Obama budget projects record $1.6 trillion deficit
By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 14, 2011; 4:26 PM
President Obama rolled out a $3.7 trillion budget blueprint Monday that would trim or terminate more than 200 federal programs next year and make key investments in education, transportation and research. The plan is aimed at boosting the nation's economy while reducing record budget deficits.
MORE...
___________________________________________________
The Defense Department won the future, or at least the budget
By Ezra Klein
The Washington Post
February 14, 2011; 1:26 PM ET
One of the big lessons of this budget is that if you work in the federal government, you want Defense Secretary Robert Gates on your side when the budget cuts come around.
The military made out quite nicely in the 2012 budget proposal.
The administration is cutting $78 billion from the Defense Department's budget -- known as "security discretionary spending" -- over the next 10 years. That's a bit of a blow, but compare it to the $400 billion they're cutting from domestic discretionary spending -- that's education, income security, food safety, environmental protection, etc. -- over the next 10 years. And keep in mind that the domestic discretionary budget is only half as large as the military's budget. So if there were equal cuts, the military would be losing $800 billion. And you could argue that the politics of that make some sense: Military spending is one of the least popular categories of federal spending.
That's what the Fiscal Commission had wanted to do. "One of the Commission’s guiding principles is that everything must be on the table" they wrote. For that reason, they recommended "equal percentage cuts from both sides."
Nor were they the only ones who thought such cuts possible. The Sustainable Defense Task Force, formed by Barney Frank and Ron Paul (among others) and staffed by a who's who of military policy experts from both sides of the aisle, produced a report (pdf) recommending up to $960 billion in cuts over the next 10 years. These were cuts, the experts said, "that would not compromise the essential security of the United States." Others disagree with that judgment, of course. One of them was Gates, who warned that major cuts in his department would be "catastrophic."
He won. The $78 billion in cuts are the exact $78 billion in cuts Gates recommended. I bet there are more than a few Cabinet secretaries who wish they had that kind of power over the president's recommendations.
It's interesting to think about this in terms of the president's focus on "winning the future." He's been very careful to speak of our challenge as primarily one of bettering ourselves and our country, not fighting our competitors. To win the future, we need to educate our people, rebuild our roads, expand broadband Internet, invest in research and development. And some of those categories are, to be sure, getting a boost in this budget. But only a small one. The R & D budget, for instance, goes up by one percentage point. And many important programs -- like Pell Grants -- are getting shaved down.
If this is a fiscally responsible budget, then cutting $500 billion -- forget $800 billion -- from the Defense Department would've opened room for much more domestic investment. It also could've gone to pay down the debt. As it is, we're pumping that money into sustaining a fighting force that's orders of magnitude larger than anything retained by any other country. The theory implicit in that decision suggests that the fight to win the future might be rather different than the Obama administration is letting on.
____________________________________________________
The Breakdown: In an Age of Austerity, Can't the US Cut the Military Budget?
Christopher Hayes
The Nation
February 11, 2011
The US maintains the most expansive and expensive military on the planet. More than half of the annual budget goes towards "defense." But in the ongoing debates about the appropriate austerity measures to take, cuts to military spending have been insufficiently prioritized. On this week's edition of The Breakdown, D.C. Editor Chris Hayes and Institute for Policy Studies Research Fellow Miriam Pemberton discuss just how much the US could afford to cut Pentagon spending while maintaining its status as the dominant military force in the world.
Resources
Miriam Pemberton on the misleading nature of military spending "cuts" (article to follow below)
Center for American Progress article on reducing military spending (highly recommended)
Robert Dreyfuss discussing the "civil war" in the GOP over demilitarization
Barney Frank on cutting NATO spending: "It Serves No Strategic Purpose"
The Independent's Robert Fisk discusses the costs of war in the Middle East
_______________________________________________________
Military Spending Cuts: Depends on what the Meaning of 'On the Table' Is
By Miriam Pemberton
Institute for Policy Studies
February 10, 2011
Let's define budget cuts as spending less next year than this year. Nothing else should qualify.
Deficit pressure has put "everything on the table" for cuts, including the Pentagon. Everyone from House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to President Barack Obama agrees on this. But what they mean by this is all over the map.
The budget Obama will present to Congress next week will likely begin what the Pentagon is billing as $78 billion in cuts to its budget over five years. In fact these are cuts to their plans for expansion, i.e., slowing a proposed increase is being defined as a cut.
While both Obama and House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan pay lip service to the "defense is on the table" mantra, both also exempt the defense budget from their budgetary restraining actions: a five-year discretionary freeze, in Obama's case, and $100 billion in cuts, in Ryan's.
The president’s debt reduction commission proposed real cuts, but these would leave the military budget only 5 percent below where President Reagan jacked it up to militarily defeat the Soviet Union — shortly before its collapse.
Defense Secretary Gates describes even those modest potential cuts as "catastrophic."
Let's define budget cuts as spending less next year than this year. Nothing else should qualify.
Savings aren't just needed because of the nation's massive debt. We also need to address our security deficit. The civilian and uniformed military leadership agrees on a key point: U.S. foreign policy needs to be less dominated by the military. Achieving that goal would entail decreasing the proportion of resources devoted to offense (the military) relative to defense (homeland security) and prevention (non-military foreign engagement). IPS will score this proposed budget's mix of security expenditures, and report the results after Obama releases it.
_____________________________________________________
“Budgets,” Jim Wallis reminds us, “are always moral documents.”
John Nichols
The Nation
Barely a month after demanding that the Constitution be read into the Congressional Record, House Republicans voted against a motion to that would have protected against Patriot Act abuses of privacy rights. Then they voted to extend the act's surveillance authorities. The first test of that morality, explains the theologian who chairs the Global Agenda Council on Faith for the World Economic Forum, is how those with the least power, the fewest political connections and the greatest economic challenges fare. “Our budget should not be balanced on the backs of the poor,” says Wallis. “Cuts should not come from the services and programs that people rely on now more than ever. The reality is that we have a lot of wasteful spending in our federal budget, but most of it does not come from things that help the most vulnerable people in our society.”
So how does President Obama’s $3.73 billion budget proposal, which has as its takeaway line a promise to reduce deficits by $1.1 trillion over the next decade, fare on the moral test?
The president’s approach is far less draconian than was proposed last fall by the co-chairs of his deficit commission, who would have had the president consider processes of privatizing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Obama is not proposing to raise the retirement age or to cut the benefits available to those who reach it. At the same time, he proposes new education spending and some needed investments in high-speed rail ($53 billion over the next six years), building a nationwide wireless network ($15.7 billion) and establishing a national infrastructure bank ($50 billion) that would encourage investment in needed projects to create jobs.
All that’s got House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, sputtering about how the president “is abdicating leadership on that point.”
The president counters: “I’ve called for a freeze on annual domestic spending over the next five years. This freeze would cut the deficit by more than $400 billion over the next decade, bringing this kind of spending—domestic discretionary spending— to its lowest share of our economy since Dwight Eisenhower was President.”
But the way to a moral budget is not to try to strike some sort of balance between the Ayn Rand–derived fantasies of Paul Ryan and the reality that millions of American families rely on programs paid for by that “domestic discretionary spending” to survive.
The way to a moral budget is to assure that the most vulnerable Americans are protected. At the very least, it should place more serious demands of the wealthy and Pentagon contractors than on low-income and working-class households. The Progressive Chance Campaign Committee gets to the heart of the matter when it suggests: “Every proposed cut to necessary programs like Pell Grants and heating for low-income seniors needs to be judged in the context of the unnecessary tax cuts for Wall Street millionaires that passed at the end of last year.”
By that measure, the Obama budget—with its emphasis on domestic spending cuts that would would trim or terminate more than 200 federal programs in the coming year—fails some serious moral tests.
Among other things, the president’s proposed budget would:
• Cut $2.5 billion in heating assistance for low-income people.
• Cut $350 million from Community Development Block Grants.
• Save $100 billion over ten years by eliminating Pell Grants for needy students who want to take summer classes in order to finish their degrees sooner while allowing interest on graduate school loans to begin building up while students are still in school, meaning that the costs of getting an education will rise dramatically.
• Undermine an essential environmental initiative by cutting a quarter of the funding for the multi-state Great Lakes clean-up project. This project is especially important to so-called “rust-belt” cities where unaddressed pollution problems invariably poses the most serious health and safety threats to low-income and working-class neighborhoods.
The proposed cuts, coming just weeks after the president worked with Republican Congressional leaders to maintain Bush-era tax cuts for billionaires and to expand estate-tax exemptions for millionaires, drew a rebuke from Iowa Senator Tom Harkin, who chairs the Senate Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over labor, health and education programs.
Referring to proposed cuts that harm low-income Americans, Harkin said, “There can be pain, but I want to make sure it’s not just on them. I want to make sure there’s Wall Street pain, there’s Pentagon pain, that there’s wealthy pain.”
There will be specific opposition to the $2.5 billion hit Obama proposes for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP. Massachusetts Congressman Ed Markey, a top House Democrat, says the cut would “have a devastating effect on millions of American families.” Vermont Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy and Congressman Peter Welch declared that: “the last thing we should be doing is making it harder for the most vulnerable people in this country to stay warm in the winter.”
But it is perhaps even more unsettling to see a move to slash the far-reaching antipoverty programming that is maintained with the help of Community Development Block Grant funding. “The question is why? Why pick on this program?” asks David Bradley, director of the National Community Action Foundation, who warns: “Once the Obama administration throws a poverty program in the water, it starts a feeding frenzy.”
By doing that, Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, the second-ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said the Obama administration is letting Republicans like Ryan set far too much of the agenda.
“His people aren’t giving us a very wise set of choices. They’re cotton-balling rather than hard-balling,” explained Kaptur, who said of Obama: “He keeps waiting for Congress to save him. He ought to save himself.”
So what is available in the way of wise choices for balancing the budget?
Even conservatives such as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul say that it makes sense to look at the military budget. The Obama budget includes recommendations for a set of Department of Defense spending reductions that could reach $78 billion reduction by 2015. That sounds good. But the actual 2012 budget request for the Pentagon is for more than $550 billion—a 5 percent increase over what the Department of Defense spent last year.
As Lawrence Korb, the former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration who now serves as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, notes (writing with CAP’s Laura Conley): “In inflation-adjusted dollars, this figure is higher than at any time during the Bush years or during the Cold War.”
Instead of the spike in Pentagon spending, Jim Wallis argues that, to meet the moral test of budgeting, it’s “time to cut needless military spending. The Pentagon currently takes up more than half of our country’s discretionary spending. This does not include the billions spent on other military related expenditures or most of our spending on homeland security…. Reps. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) and Ron Paul (R-Texas) came up with a plan that they say would leave our country just as safe but save us $960 billion by 2020! Even with these cuts, we would still be by far the world’s most dominant military. When you list the countries in the world by order of their military expenditures, the United States tops the list and spends more than the next 13 countries combined.”
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