by SMU Central University Libraries
Leading up to the March 1 deadline, the White House and President Obama's cabinet have filled the press with dire warnings of the mayhem that will result if the budget sequester goes into effect. As usual, his cronies in the Main-Stream Media are helping him spread the panic.
Never mind that the
President himself proposed sequestration as a backup plan to get Congress to
raise the debt ceiling in 2011. The
Administration assures us that these across-the-board budget "cuts"
(which aren't really cuts at all, but merely reduced levels of spending
increases) will cause mayhem and prevent the government from providing
essential services.
In early 2011, the
Executive Branch had maxed out its credit cards and the Republicans in Congress
wouldn't raise the debt limit, supposedly in the name of fiscal
responsibility. Eventually, a compromise
was reached: the debt ceiling was raised, but a bipartisan "Super
Congress" would be formed to develop recommendations for reducing the
government's rate of growth in the future.
These recommendations would be submitted to Congress for approval
without amendments or delays, and everything would be fine. But just in case something went wrong, a
schedule was adopted that imposed across-the-board limits on the rate of growth
of federal spending from Fiscal Year 2013 to Fiscal Year 2021 (the
"sequester").
Unfortunately,
Congress did not approve the Super Congress's plan, and after two
extensions, it's finally time for the sequester to kick in. As a result, the skillful political
compromise of yesteryear has become an American nightmare, and the
Administration is screaming bloody murder.
In order to get
around the spending limits, President Obama resorted to a time-honored
technique: the "Firemen-First" principle. In fact, this tactic is so old, it was first
identified by Charles Peters of the Washington
Monthly back in 1976. As Ivan
Eland explains it, the
When agencies smell budget cuts in the air, they threaten to cut their most essential, popular, or politically defensible programs first - for example, money for fighting fires - to dissuade politicians from cutting their budgets. The military is no exception.
Therefore, as a
public service, the following suggestions are offered as starting points to
help the President find real cuts that won't drag America into the abyss.
1. Roll back the
unmanned aerial vehicle program (a.k.a. "drones")
Do we really need that new drone base in
Niger? Aren't the ones we already
have in Ethiopia and Djibouti enough, or do we really have to threaten
every square inch of the African continent? And while we're at it, maybe we could stop the
drone strikes in Pakistan, too.
Obviously, the President won't consider it a benefit to save the lives
of dozens of women and children, and stop wounding literally hundreds of
innocent civilians. After all, those
foreigners don't represent a cost to his Administration. But with the money saved from ending the
drone strikes, maybe we could afford to deploy that second aircraft-carrier group to the Middle East, after all.
Then there are all
the drones the federal government plans to roll out here in the U.S. According to the President, "We respect
and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct
counterterrorism operations outside of the United States. The rules outside of
the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United
States, in part because our capacity, for example, to capture terrorists in the
United States are very different than in the foothills or mountains of
Afghanistan or Pakistan." Of
course, we will never know what those safeguards are, because that's a state
secret. Maybe the best safeguard would
be to stop buying them in the first place.
Oh, sure, the
Unmanned Systems Caucus will complain about their loss of
2. Roll back the
American world empire
Now, about that
second carrier group the Administration wants to deploy to the Middle East:
why? Aren't we ending the war in
Afghanistan, and isn't the war in Iraq already over? So, if one carrier group was enough to fight
both those wars, why do we need to deploy a second one now?
For that matter,
why do we need to leave 9,000 soldiers in Afghanistan after 2014, if, as
the President says, "by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will
be over?" Is he going to pose
for photos on the un-deployed aircraft carrier like President Bush did when
When NATO attacked Libya, the U.S. launched 112 Tomahawk cruise missiles on the very first day, despite the fact that Moammar Ghaddafi had been cooperating with us on nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, Great Britain had less than half that many Tomahawks in its entire inventory. The cost of these missiles is reported to be $1.41 million each. That's pretty amazing, since the cost of cruise missiles was said to be between $1.3 million and $1.5 million when President Clinton launched 12 of them against Iraq in 1993. Apparently, economies of scale have entirely offset inflation over the past 10 years. But either way, it appears that we might be able to save a buck or two if we simply reduce our inventories to a level consistent with, say, the ability to destroy Mali in a single day. And by the way, toppling Ghaddafi paved the way for al Qaeda to take over.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
