Leonard says GOP Is intent on sabotage
by Linda Beale
Leonard says GOP Is intent on sabotage
Andrew Leonard of Salon writes often about tax and economic issues. In Friday’s column, he addressed the increasingly obstructionist tactics employed by far-right representative Paul Ryan and a coterie of other GOP representatives who are willing to sacrifice core systems in order to keep the military machine humming (and putting money into pockets of GOP arms merchant constituents) while ensuring that anything that provides aide to the less well off is labeled as a disrespected “entitlement” that can be chopped and destroyed at will. See Andrew Leonard, Sabotage: the new GOP plan, Salon.com (May 4, 2012).
Ryan introduced a bill on Wednesday that would achieve the Holy Grail of GOP political goals–continuing the ridiculous Reaganomics militarization by ending the sequester that would cut $600 billion from the military entitlement budget, and at the same time cutting drastically almost every single program that protects ordinary Americans. See Ryan offers bill to end sequester in bid to eliminate defense cuts, The Hill (May 4, 2012).
As a commenter on the Hill piece noted, the US military budget is overblown and needs to be cut.
The U.S. Spends More On Defense than Next Top 14 Countries Combined Wiki List of countries by military expenditures SIPRI Yearbook 2011 – world’s top military spenders in 2010 (in billions).
1. United States…..698.0
2. China…………… .119.0
3. United Kingdom….59.6
4. France………….. ..59.3
5. Russia………….. ..58.7
6. Japan…………… ..54.5
7. Saudi Arabia……..45.2
8. Germany………… 45.2
9. India ………………41.3
10. Italy…………. ….37.0
11. Brazil…………….33.5
12. South Korea…….27.6
13. Australia………….24.0
14. Canada…………. .22.8
15. Turkey………….. .17.5
Unbelievably, one of the things that Ryan would prefer to cut, rather than see some of the military’s perks diminish, is Title II of the Dodd Frank Act. I guess the radical right in the GOP has a short-term memory: it thinks there is no need for the government to have liquidation authority over the too-big-to-fail banks. Instead, it apparently would prefer more outright bailouts of the well-to-do bankers who speculate with our economy for their own private gains. Oh, and the GOP-led House financial services committee wants to defund the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau–to again allow the banks and insurance companies to undertake the rapacious exploitation of ordinary Americans through exorbitant and unconscionable fees. Other GOP “reforms” include medical liability, with the GOP protecting medical establishments from facing the piper when they make mistakes that they could have avoided through appropriate care.
Pretty clear just how much the Supreme Court’s terrible decision in Citizens United with its warped view of free speech in relation to elections is distorting our government’s ability to function for the good of ordinary citizens.
crossposted with ataxingmatter
If only we could spend 100 billion of this on hiring teachers…we could knock down the unemployment rate by 2-3%, boost our GDP by 1-2%, and have a society that is much better informed and able to deal with the challenges of the coming decade…and still be spending much more than the next dozen or so countries combined on wasteful and mostly useless war machines.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=70o
I think we should continue an aggressive investment in aerospace defense and superiority. Never good to become helpless in this area, and it does have good spinoff for commercial stuff.
The Army, OTOH, needs to be reduced to the NG/AR.
The Navy should lose the supercarriers and become a glorified Coast Guard + supporting the USMC mission — I’d preserve the USMC as-is to be our expeditionary force. If the USMC can’t handle it, then we’d have to draft up and turn the Reserve back into a proper Army again.
Unfortunately, it looks like that here in the real world the USMC lost the political battle and the Army is going to take over its missions this century.
But if I were running things I’d cut everything down to $400B/yr over the next 10 years. That’s $40B/yr in cuts. Ouch.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=70q
is YOY growth in DOD spending though. They didn’t complain when they were growing $60B/yr+.
I agree, James. If this nation is truly concerned about national security, it would realize that it needs to invest in repairing our crumbling infrastructure and in funding human capital development by reversing the trend towards prohibitively expensive public institutions of higher education.
In the long run, we need to step back from our position as the “policeman” of the world–our overdeveloped military demands that it be used, and thus we get into damaging preemptive wars such as the Bush regime led us to, and development of even more expensive war toys that invite themselves to be used. Letting the sequester take place as scheduled actually seems like a pretty good deal for America.
I should probably have noted in the post that the sequester doesn’t really CUT the defense budget except in one year, I think. It merely restrains funding, keeping it more or less level rather than allowing it to continue to grow as it has for the last few decades. It’s clearly time for us to get off this ever-growing military train, but it remains to be seen whether there are enough politicians in office with the guts to do it.
>it remains to be seen whether there are enough politicians in office with the guts to do it.
Not a chance in hell.
Wow, what part of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism didn’t you understand? Creating a nanny state of state sponsored handouts does nothing to motivate a passive feeloading population. Still, I would agree that the military is the biggest government social welfare program of them all and needs to be deeply cut along with the other failed government entitlement experiments.