Wow. This is amazingly decent and dismissive of an entire genre of public "discourse." The Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly stressed to Congress that military spending is low as a percentage of GDP. Even though it's high and has been rising each of the past 15 years as a dollar amount adjusted for inflation, as a percentage of the federal discretionary budget, and as a percentage of global military spending, the theory indeed seems to be that if we have more money we should buy more weapons because we can. This requires a psychiatrist, not an economist.
"The real question is how much the U.S. needs to spend to maintain military dominance. To help answer it, consider a more useful comparison: For every dollar the world spends on military outlays, America accounts for 46 cents. China, a distant second, comes in at about 7 cents."
Hmm. Is that the real question? Isn't the real question how the United States can best keep its nation safe? Isn't it at the very least an open question whether striving to dominate the globe is making us safer or putting us at risk? The answer above to the wrong question is dramatically understated, and yet hugely important and worldview shattering for many potential readers. I hope they read it.
"Gov. McDonnell is right to worry about the effect of defense spending cuts here in Virginia. Congress should pass legislation to stave off the sequestration meat ax. However, it needs to make judicious cuts to the defense budget. Overseas bases, redundant weapons systems, even force structures should all be on the table. The nation currently borrows 43 cents of every dollar it spends. And there is simply no way to fix that problem without including military cuts as part of the solution."
Wouldn't you know they'd reach the wrong conclusion after so much good rhetoric. The sequestration meat ax would cut that $1.2 trillion budget by about $50 billion. It should be cut by much more. Cutting back to merely three times the size of China would allow us not only to pay off debt but to make college free, eliminate student loans, develop a massive green energy program, and update our infrastructure. Those are the tradeoffs that should have been mentioned. The mass murder of non-Americans that is generated by the war momentum that Eisenhower warned us war spending would create might also merit consideration. Nonetheless, I doubt I shall ever see this good an editorial in my local paper again.
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