Crushing the Deficit

The Atlantic has been crushing it this year, easily my favorite publication right now.  Here's an article that really lays out Romney/Ryan and their plans for our already bloated deficit:

 It remains the case that the Romney-Ryan ticket, as fleshed out in recent days, is running on the following:

• Zero cuts to the military budget. "If I'm president and Paul Ryan's vice president we will not cut our military budget," Mitt Romney said. He's also talked repeatedly about increasing defense spending.  
• Zero tax increases on investment, savings, or the middle class, and a broad income-tax rate cut.
• Zero cuts to Medicare for the entirety of two terms in office.
• War with Iran if it keeps pursuing a nuclear program. 

What about those policy promises suggests to deficit hawks that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will shrink the deficit? Meanwhile, the GOP ticket promises to eliminate tax deductions but won't specify which ones. Naturally, the deductions that cost the most are correspondingly popular with voters. How is it that deficit hawks fail to appreciate the fact that the most likely parts of the Romney-Ryan agenda to pass are the tax cuts, increases in military spending, and the restoration of $700 billion plus to Medicare, while the least likely to pass are the elimination of tax deductions?

So for all you folks out there trying to put the deficit anvil around Obama's neck, what do you think about the Romney/Ryan plan?  I mean really.  What do you think?  I know.  You know I know and now you know you know, too. 

We're Still #1, in Arms Sales

I guess "we're #1 in arms sales" could go without saying, I mean we do have the world's biggest military by a wide margin (The Pentagon's budget is larger than the next 18 defense budgets in the world), so of course we have lots of arms to sell. Well, thanks goodness, we have buyers for our military weapons. And luckily for us, they are Muslims from the same country as the hijackers who attacked us on 9/11, our friends, Saudi Arabia. It's OK, these are the Muslims who are our friends. Hey, congrats on your big profit, America!

"In its biggest arms deal ever, the United States announced it will sell up to 60 billion dollars worth of warplanes, helicopters and other weapons to Saudi Arabia, partly to help it counter Iran."

More Contractors Killed Than Soldiers

This year, more private contractors have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan than soldiers. Congratulations, we have privatized our military.

"More private contractors than soldiers were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent months, the first time in history that corporate casualties have outweighed military losses on America’s battlefields.

More than 250 civilians working under U.S. contracts died in the war zones between January and June 2010... In the same period, 235 soldiers died, according to Pentagon figures.

This milestone in the privatization of modern U.S. warfare reflects both the drawdown in military forces in Iraq and the central role of contractors in providing logistics support to local armies and police forces, contracting and military experts said."

We're outsourcing our military. Jobs that used to be for military folks are now for "contractors". I wonder what a strict reading of the Constitution would say about that? Maybe a Tea Partier can help me out here?

Update: A Republican friend asks:
"And the problem here?"

Well, I don't think we should be hiring private companies to act as our military. If we're going to do that, maybe we should hire a bunch of cheap labor to act as our soldiers? Why should we have to fight at all? Let's pay "them" to do it. That may be all well and good until "they" decide they want the power. I guess that's when we're supposed to defend ourselves using "2nd Amendment Guarantees".
I've written about this before...

Wars, What Are They Good For?

Wars. Well, they're good for some things, like defense contractor stock prices. Maybe some things, like Military and Health Care are not the best candidates to share in our praiseworthy capitalist system. Capitalism relies on profits, and these two sectors should not be driven by profit, because that leads the inherent bureaucracy to do things for money rather than doing what is best. Defense contractors are driven to fight long, extended wars just as medical companies are driven to come up with drugs to treat patients over a long term. You get the most money that way, over a long term. Sittin' pretty.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Capitalism.... clearly it drives the world economy and has been pivotal in the development of civilization. Yay Capitalism, really! But military and health care are too central to us as humans, as spiritual beings, that we cannot allow profit to run them. In War, an innocent civilian cut down for arbitrariness sake, in medicine, a patient dies for lack of insurance, unable to afford the medicine needed to save or extend their lives. Surely we as humans cannot accept such things. We cannot trust Capitalism when it comes to war and health, just like we can't trust the Government, unless we truly believe that We the People ARE the Government. I can't think of a better way to "promote the general welfare" than to provide modern health care. I consider basic medical care a human right. If this makes me a liberal, so be it. I'll still defend most of Reagan's Presidency, Bush I's, and even good ol' Jesse Helms if you want me to.

But back to the military spending. The two wars we've been fighting, by the latest estimates, will cost us between $2-$3 Trillion. Yikes. Just think if we'd spent that on say.... health care? But if it was REALLY important to fight those wars, you know, maybe that's what we had to spend. I'd have been OK with just Bin Laden's head on a stick. We've "shuffled the deck" a bit over there, but solved nothing, and we've paid a great cost.

From Consortiumnews.com:

“On my last day in Iraq,” veteran McClatchy News correspondent Leila Fadel wrote August 9, “as on my first day in Iraq, I couldn’t see what the United States and its allies had accomplished. … I couldn’t understand what thousands of American soldiers had died for and why hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had been killed.” ...

“Since the Iraq War began,” Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive wrote, “aerospace and defense industry stocks have more than doubled. General Dynamics did even better than that. Its stock has tripled.”

An Associated Pressaccount published July 23 observed: “With the military fighting two wars and Pentagon budgets on a steady upward rise, defense companies regularly posted huge gains in profits and rosier earnings forecasts during recent quarters. Even as the rest of the economy tumbled last fall, military contractors, with the federal government as their primary customer, were a relative safe haven.”...

The element of “risk,” so basic to capitalism, has been trampled by Pentagon purchasing agents even as its top brass rattle their missiles at supposedly enemy governments abroad. If this isn’t enough, in 2004 the Bush administration slipped a special provision into tax legislation to cut the tax on war profits to 7 percent compared to 21 percent paid by most U.S. manufacturers.

“As of summer, 2007, there were more ‘private contractors’ deployed on the U.S. government payroll in Iraq (180,000) than there were actual soldiers (160,000),” Scahill said. “These contractors worked for some 630 companies and drew personnel from more than 100 countries around the globe. … This meant the U.S. military had actually become the junior partner in the coalition that occupies Iraq.”

And each Blackwater operative was costing the American taxpayers $1,222 per day. The Defense Department remains, of course, America’s No. 1 Employer, with 2.3 million workers (roughly twice the size of Wal-Mart, which has 1.2 million staffers) perhaps because America’s biggest export is war.

“Who pays Halliburton and Bechtel?” philosopher Noam Chomsky asked rhetorically in his Imperial Ambitions. “The U.S. taxpayer,” he answers.

“The same taxpayers fund the military-corporate system of weapons manufacturers and technology companies that bombed Iraq. So first you destroy Iraq, then you rebuild it. It’s a transfer of wealth from the general population to narrow sectors of the population.”...

As Stiglitz and Bilmes remind us, “The money spent on Iraq could have been spent on schools, roads, or research. These investments yield high returns.”

Or Health Care!

On the other hand, maybe Americans want to keep paying to operate 2,000 domestic and foreign military bases and spend more money on armies and weapons of death than all other nations combined. Maybe they like living in the greatest Warfare State the world has ever known.

My hunch, though, is a lot of Americans haven’t connected the country’s looming bankruptcy with the greedy, gang from the military-industrial complex out to control the planet, its people and its precious resources.

OK, now that guy is more liberal than me, maybe even a crazed loon for all I know, but he's right about our military spending. No one's to blame, it's the nature of bureaucracy, as Eisenhower warned. We just have to recognize it and use our humanity to correct it. When all is said and done, We the People have to run everything ourselves anyway, we are the Government. So we may as well... no, it is our duty as Americans, to show humanity to our fellow humans by avoiding war, and helping the sick. Seems like the Christian thing to do as well, so "bonus", right? Right on! Go America!

Where Our Taxes are Spent

2009 Defense Bill

Believe it or not, Congress approved another bill for over $600 Billion last week. Not the "bailout" bill, this one if for Defense Appropriations for 2009. Alternet points out:

On Wednesday, September 24th, right in the middle of the fight over billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations measure.)

The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is only a down-payment on the full yearly cost of these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary bills.) It also included a 3.9% pay raise for military personnel, and $5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the administration or the secretary of defense. It also fully funds the Pentagon's request for a radar site in the Czech Republic, a hare-brained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill passed by a vote of 392-39 and will fly through the Senate, where a similar bill has already been approved. And no one will even think to mention it in the same breath with the discussion of bailout funds for dying investment banks and the like.

Billions here, billions there.... you know what they say.
We need to re-think out spending policies, and get our priorities in order. How about building bridges and highways in our Georgia rather than in Russia's Georgia? We need infrastructure dollars for our own country, dollars we say we don't have, but somehow we come up with those dollars for infrastructure projects in Iraq, Georgia, Pakistan, etc. And call it a defense expenditure. And we don't even talk about it....

761

Seven hundred and sixty-one. Tom Engelhardt has an enlightening article over at Alternet called:

The US Has 761 Military Bases Across the Planet, and We Simply Never Talk About It

You would think that all of this would be genuine news, that the establishment of new bases would regularly generate significant news stories, that books by the score would pour out on America's version of imperial control. But here's the strange thing: We garrison the globe in ways that really are -- not to put too fine a point on it -- unprecedented, and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, you basically wouldn't know it; or, thought about another way, you wouldn't have to know it.

In Washington, our garrisoning of the world is so taken for granted that no one seems to blink when billions go into a new base in some exotic, embattled, war-torn land. There's no discussion, no debate at all. News about bases abroad, and Pentagon basing strategy, is, at best, inside-the-fold stuff, meant for policy wonks and news jockeys. There may be no subject more taken for granted in Washington, less seriously attended to, or more deserving of coverage.

The article is rather long, but this is one of those stories that deserves more attention than the lipstick-laden pig.

Military Spending Out of Control

Interesting article on AlterNet from Chalmers Johnson about how much we (mis)spend national defense:

"It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense's planned expenditures for the fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations' military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The U.S. has become the largest single seller of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out President Bush's two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since the second world war.

Before we try to break down and analyze this gargantuan sum, there is one important caveat. Figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable. The numbers released by the Congressional Reference Service and the Congressional Budget Office do not agree with each other. Robert Higgs, senior fellow for political economy at the Independent Institute, says: "A well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it.""

Only so many places we can cut, and we need to make cuts. Our military spending is hurting us in the pocketbook (not to mention the immorality of the Iraq invasion/occupation, or the fact that it has actually worked against our national interest, making us less safe). Time to regroup.

For the Love of Money

As we approach the 9/11 anniversary, I think it's worth noting that our response to the attacks has been unwise, even if you only look at the monetary costs. Robert Scheer writes:

"In the effort to retaliate against terrorists who hijacked planes six years ago with an arsenal of $3 knives, this year’s overall defense budget has been pushed to $657 billion. We are now spending $3 billion a week in Iraq alone, occupying a country that had nothing to do with the tragedy that sparked this orgy of militarism. The waste is so enormous and irrelevant to our national security that a rational person might embrace the libertarian creed if only for the sake of sanity. Clearly, the federal government no longer cares much about providing for health, education, hurricane reconstruction or even bridge safety, as the military budget now dwarfs all other discretionary spending, despite the lack of a sophisticated enemy in sight."

When you look at the overall budget numbers, what our government spends money on, it becomes obvious that the military takes up too much of our spending. The Iraq War has just blown it through the roof. Our surpluses have turned to debts. And that's just the money side of the problem...

A Modest Earmark

"A lot of people in Washington are getting rich off earmarks, and it's about time I got my piece of the pie. So members of Congress, if you're reading this, how about sending an earmark my way - perhaps in the form of a shiny new boat?

Not a yacht or anything fancy, just a modest speedboat that would only set Uncle Sam back $30,000.

To some critics, this earmark might represent an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars. Curmudgeonly tight-wads would grumble about excessive federal spending and mounting deficits. Elitist "good government" types would complain about the abuse of political clout and the propensity of such behavior to breed corruption. Esoteric political scientists might decry the unfortunate ease with which money is misspent when government bestows a generous benefit to a small group of people (in this case, me and my drinking buddies) at the expense of a larger group (taxpayers).

But I don't buy that mumbo-jumbo anymore. I think my boat would be a jobs machine. I'll purchase an American-built boat from a local dealer, thus creating a number of manufacturing and service-sector jobs.

Just think: Who's going to scrape the barnacles off the bottom of my boat? Who will supply the gasoline? Who will provide winter storage?

Jobs, jobs, jobs.

As hardworking Americans service, clean and store my boat, they will pay sales, income and other taxes. Much of this money will be sent back to Washington, where it can be used to further expand the economy through earmarking."

This article appeared in the Myrtle Beach Sun News, April 2, 2006.

The original "Modest Proposal": http://www.online-literature.com/swift/947/

War $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Casualty of War: US Economy:

"The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost taxpayers $314 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office projects additional expenses of perhaps $450 billion over the next 10 years.

That could make the combined campaigns, especially the war in Iraq, the most expensive military effort in the last 60 years, causing even some conservative experts to criticize the open-ended commitment to an elusive goal. The concern is that the soaring costs, given little weight before now, could play a growing role in U.S. strategic decisions because of the fiscal impact."

Pretty soon you're talking about real money here...

e-Nuff Fluff...here's news

Fluff Stories Crowd Out News the Nation Needs

"Official reports bragged about Cpl. Tillman's bravery("The fact is, investigators determined fairly quickly that Tillman died of so-called "friendly fire"; he was accidentally killed by another squad of Army Rangers and died yelling, "Cease fire! Friendlies!"), just as a year prior they disingenuously advised us about Pvt. Jessica Lynch firing her weapon at the enemy until she ran out of ammunition. Unfortunately, these stories were grossly embellished.

Underreported story two: A Senate committee led by Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., accused George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament, of improprieties regarding the U.N. Oil-for-Food program in Iraq. Sen. Coleman subpoenaed Mr. Galloway, apparently assuming Galloway would roll over for his committee the way Democrats in this country usually roll over for Republicans these days.

To everyone's surprise, Galloway roared into Washington and proceeded to make a fool out of the unctuous Sen. Coleman. When Coleman questioned Galloway about allegations that he had been advancing the interests of Saddam Hussein, Galloway responded: ''Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong and 100,000 people paid with their lives; 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies; 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever on a pack of lies.'' Galloway's Senate testimony was simply bombastic, but if you want to read it in its entirety, you'll have to look it up on the internet. It received scant coverage in the press.

Underreported story three: We also have ''The Downing Street memo,'' which nearly caused Tony Blair to lose his government. In this memorandum, British foreign-policy aide Matthew Rycroft summarized a July 23, 2002, meeting between Blair and his top security advisers. Rycroft also analyzed a U.S. visit by Richard Dearlove, who then led Britain's intelligence service. The Dearlove visit occurred while President Bush was still promising Americans that no decision had been made to launch a war against Iraq. The memo said that ''the intelligence and facts were being fixed'' by the Bush administration to support its previous determination to invade Iraq. According to the memo, the British attorney general also seriously questioned the legality of the war. U.S. media have given short-shrift to the Downing Street memo, which essentially affirms that Americans were lied to in the fall of 2002 about the decision to invade Iraq.

There is a fourth story, still unwritten. It should examine exactly what has happened to the U.S. media. Many vital news events now receive minimal coverage. This is a shameful development. We should demand more hard news coverage, because we have a right to be well-informed. It is not unpatriotic to print stories unfavorable to the Bush administration."

I wonder how many Americans like the way their tax dollars are used:
Many voters and our elected representatives hardly bat an eye over the fact that half the federal discretionary budget funds the military. This will be $438 billion in 2006 -- excluding the costs of action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the National Priorities Project, the average San Francisco household, for instance, paid:

$13,139 in federal income tax in 2004, of which

$5,097 funded the military (including interest on its debt),
$2,664 for health care,
$482 for education, and
$52 for job training.

Base Closing Savings

The last I heard from Donald Rumsfeld, the proposed base closings will save $50 Billion over the next 20 years. He says this like we're supposed to be impressed by the great savings we will have as we transition to more effective military. I think the changes are necessary, and the military needs to adapt to the current threats to America. What really sticks in my craw is the fact that we will save, over 20 years, less than half of what the Iraq War has cost us in the last year alone. The supplemental bill this year was for $87 Billion, that's much more than we'll save in 20 years with these 'draconian' cutbacks. I know that deciding to go to war is about more than money, but I don't think the American people fully realize the costs that we all bear for this war. The kind of money we have spent (and have yet to spend) is enough to fund entire entitlement programs for a generation (or Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, take your pick). So, while our military will cutback to save us $50 Billion over 20 years, it also asked for and received $87 Billion EXTRA just this year for the war in the middle east. The ONLY way this makes any kind of economic sense is if our leaders are far-sighted enough to see that the near future of world order lies in fossil fuel. Russia has plenty, introspective China has made nice with many countries (including many in our hemisphere like Venezuela), India is planning a pipeline despite our objections, and since the 70's America's oil needs have depended on foreign sources. We are there to secure our oil needs for the future. That is the only way this misadventure makes sense economically. I guess you could still argue the 'humanitarian' reasons (wait...we've been the torturers and murderers sometimes), or the WMD (wait...nevermind), or....what else was there? Oh, the terrorists, that's right. And when will we be leaving? When they're good and ready? Something tells me the $50 Billion we're saving over the next 20 years has already been spent. Will the cost of the Iraq War be worth the money we've spent (not to mention the lives)? The only way it could begin to be worth it is if we secure enough oil for our needs, and the administration wants us to believe that oil has nothing to do with it. I'd rather they just be honest that oil was a major reason for the invasion, and that securing an oil supply for US is important for our national security...just as important as stopping terrorists and evil dictators. We depend on oil and have not made progress on creating new sources of energy, so we have to use our greatest power (military) to secure it. What if instead of invading Iraq, we had decided to spend that money on alternative fuel sources? Heck, we'd probably have fusion now if we'd poured that kind of money into research. But I digress, the real issue here is the huge savings from cutting military bases....that savings is tiny compared to the costs of this war, and I hope the American public can see these numbers together and recognize what a drain the Iraq war has been on our country.