First, shockingly, let’s review some facts.
The 2011 budget includes … a $1.267 trillion budget deficit …
… and spending on defense,
For the 2010 fiscal year, the president’s base budget of the Department of spending on “overseas contingency operations” brings the sum to $663.8 billion.
Using my land-grant university math – that gives us a delta of what, $603.2 billion if we just became Costa Rica overnight?
From that man who brought us the Community Reinvestment Act, we have this statement of brilliance,
The senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee says the biggest reason the United States is seeing its credit downgraded is that it spends too much money being “the military policemen of the world.”
Rep. Barney Frank tells CBS’s “The Early Show” that reining in defense spending is “going to be my mantra” for the next few months.
The liberal Massachusetts Democrat says $200 billion could be saved “without in any way endangering our security”
Being that Rep. Frank (D-MA) is being kind and will not get rid of all military spending – let’s do that math again. Cut the military by roughly 1/3 and you still have $1.067 trillion to go …. and he will have what mantra to address that?
When will the media start doing it homework and challenge politicians like adults?
I doubt he has because to the Left he is just a dead white male slave owner, but perhaps Frank should read a bit of George Washington when he ponders the nature of and requirement for national debt.
As a very important source of strength and security, cherish public credit. One method of preserving it is, to use it as sparingly as possible; avoiding occasions of expense by cultivating peace, but remembering also that timely disbursements to prepare for danger frequently prevent much greater disbursements to repel it; avoiding likewise the accumulation of debt, not only by shunning occasions of expense, but by vigorous exertions in time of peace to discharge the debts, which unavoidable wars may have occasioned, not ungenerously throwing upon posterity the burthen, which we ourselves ought to bear.
Of course – as we have seen with the incredibly shrinking to almost non-existent miltary capabilities in our European allies, eventually the welfare state results in not having the ability to have a military.
The traditional way to debt was through war – though as we have seen above, war is not the cause of today’s debt. If a nation is saddled with debt prior to war – there is no financial way to expand the military to fight the next major war when it comes – and it will as it always does. That is a formula to defeat without even a shot being fired. Maybe that is the point.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.