Re: Oh What a Lovely Budget Item

YES. I've had it to here with "fiscal responsibility" Republicans that
exclude our military spending.


On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 2:08 PM, david white <[email protected]> wrote:

> http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/01/oh-what-a-lovely-budget-item
>
> Oh What a Lovely Budget Item
> For a neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water's edge.
> Jesse Walker | April 1, 2011
>
> When Bill Kristol endorsed America's intervention in Libya, the Weekly
> Standard editor was being completely consistent with everything else he has
> said about American foreign policy. He just wasn't being consistent with
> his
> pose as a proponent of fiscal restraint. It's bracing to watch Kristol
> twirl
> so easily from denouncing "the Democrats' orgy of spending" and complaining
> about Republicans who "don't have a credible plan to deal with the debt or
> the deficit" to jubilating that the president "didn't shrink from defending
> the use of force." But the pundit's gyrations can't obscure a basic
> reality:
> You can pay your bills or you can be a global policeman, but you can't do
> both. Not in 2011.
>
> According to ABC, the cost of Obama's kinetic spending reached $600 million
> in its first week. The Pentagon estimates that the total could reach $800
> million by the end of September, and the Pentagon just might be lowballing.
> Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
> Assessments, has told The National Journal that the price tag could "easily
> pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things
> go." And if things don't go well...
>
> But let's stick, for the moment, with the costs of that initial week.
> That's
> already more than half the amount House Republicans have asked to cut from
> Americorps. It's more than twice the amount they've asked to cut from
> Amtrak.
> It's nearly four times the size of National Public Radio's entire operating
> budget for fiscal year 2011, including the parts that come from private
> sources. All this for just a week of a war that—unlike our invasions and
> occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan—doesn't even pretend to be an act of
> self-
> defense. (When Kristol endorsed a spending freeze, he made an explicit
> exception for "national security." I realize that "national security" is
> usually a euphemism for "anything remotely related to foreign policy," but
> just for fun, let's take it literally. Does anyone out there seriously
> believe NATO's planes are in Libya's skies to keep Americans secure?)
>
> And what about those troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the price tag
> isn't threatening to hit a billion but long ago topped a trillion? It goes
> without saying that Kristol and his cohort still support both wars even as
> they're eager to add a third. It also goes without saying that the Libyan
> operation will make it harder to make military cuts of any kind. (As a
> spokesman for Joe Lieberman put it to Politico, "Congress should be very
> careful and cautious about any reductions in defense spending, given the
> many
> profound responsibilities shouldered by our military at this time.") For a
> neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water's edge.
>
> There are several coherent ways to think about federal spending and foreign
> policy right now. You can address America's fiscal crisis by calling for
> serious cuts both at home and abroad. That's the libertarian path. You can
> deny that we're facing a serious fiscal crisis at all, and thus feel free
> to
> support new spending at home and overseas. That's what the pro-war, pro-
> bailout liberal hawks have been doing. And you can deny we face a serious
> fiscal crisis but join in the libertarians' other arguments against the
> wars.
> That's the liberal doves' approach.
>
> What you can't coherently claim is that we need to both (a) bring our
> financial house in order or face fiscal ruin and (b) embark on one
> expensive
> open-ended military adventure after another. Yet conservatives in the
> Kristol
> mold don't seem to see a contradiction here at all.
>
> On Thursday, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post led off a blog entry
> with
> fulsome praise for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and a letter he recently wrote
> endorsing American intervention in Libya. She contrasted Rubio and his red-
> blooded hawkishness with President Obama, who she assured us "would still
> be
> dithering" if it weren't for pressure from "Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron,
> Hillary Clinton and a few others." She made it clear that she thinks the
> locales that demand our leadership are not limited to Libya. She was
> especially scornful of Obama's alleged belief that "we will meet our
> obligations" to the world only if "it doesn't cost too much."
>
> And then, in the very same post, she complained that the president's budget
> is "devoid of serious measures to steer us back from the brink of fiscal
> doom." She's right about that. But she isn't one to talk.
>
> Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine.
>
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