Re: Oh What a Lovely Budget Item

Yup.  We need an across the board spending cut.  Pick a number, 3, 5, 8 or 10% 
and cut EVERYTHING, including entitlements and defense spending.  


Mike F. 




________________________________
From: Bruce Geerdes <[email protected]>
To: DADL (off topic) <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, April 4, 2011 3:16:25 PM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] 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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