Cutting $100 billion? ... easy
Here’s the latest news from Congress, in case you’ve been in Afghanistan for the last couple of weeks. A debate about slashing the federal budget is now upon us, while fears of a possible government shutdown as spring approaches are on the rise. The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives originally picked $40 billion as its target figure for cuts to the as-yet-not-enacted 2011 budget.
That was the gauntlet it threw down to the Obama administration, only to find its own proposal slashed to bits by the freshman class of that body's conservative majority.
They insisted on adhering to a Republican Pledge to America vow to cut $100 billion from the budget. With that figure back on the table, Democrats are gasping, while pundits are predicting widespread pain in the land, including the possible loss of at least 70,000 jobs “as government aid to cops, teachers, and research is slashed.”
In the meantime, the Obama administration has hustled its own entry in the cut-and-burn sweepstakes into place, leaving Democrats again gasping. Its plan calls for ending or trimming more than 200 federal programs next year. It also reportedly offers cuts adding up to $1.1 trillion over a decade and puts in place a “five-year freeze on domestic programs [that] would reduce spending in that category to the lowest level, measured against the economy, since President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office in 1961.”
It all sounds daunting, and the muttering is only beginning about “entitlement” programs -- Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid -- that have yet to be touched.
Which reminds me: Didn’t I mention Afghanistan?
If so, how fortunate, because there’s a perfectly obvious path toward that Republican goal of $100 billion. If we were to embark on it, there would be even more cuts to follow and -- believe it or not -- they wouldn't be all that painful, provided we did one small thing: change our thinking about making war.
After all, according to the Pentagon, the cost of the Afghan War in 2012 will be almost $300 million a day or, for all 365 of them, $107.3 billion. Like anything having to do with American war-fighting, however, such figures regularly turn out to be undercounts. Other estimates for our yearly war costs there go as high as $120-$160 billion.
And let’s face it, it's a war worth ending fast. Almost a decade after the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. military is still fruitlessly engaged in possibly the stupidest frontier war in our history, thousands of miles from home in the backlands of the planet. It's just the sort of dumb conflict that has, historically, tended to drive declining imperial powers around the bend, just the sort -- in the very same country -- that helped do in the Soviet Union. And though news from that war remains remarkably grim, were we by some miracle to win, for hundreds of billions of dollars we would have gained tenuous control over the fifth poorest, second most corrupt, and premier narco-state on the planet. Al-Qaeda, on the other hand, would undoubtedly still be happily ensconced in the Pakistani tribal border areas with a range of superbly failed states available elsewhere for exploitation.
There’s genuine money to be slashed simply by bringing the troops home, but okay, I hear you. You live in Washington and you can’t bear to give up that war, lock, stock, and barrel.
I understand. Really, I do. So let’s just pretend that we’re part of that “moderate” and beleaguered House leadership and really only want to go after $40 billion in the 2011 federal budget.
In that case, here’s an idea! We’ve been training the Afghan military and police forces for almost a decade now, dumping an estimated $29-billion-plus into the endeavor, only to find that, unlike the Taliban, our Afghans generally prefer not to fight and love to desert. What if the Obama administration were simply to stop the training program? What if we weren’t to spend the $11.6 billion slated for this year, or the up-to-$12.8 billion being discussed for next year, or the $6 billion or more annually thereafter to create a security force of nearly 400,000 Afghans that we’ll have to pay for into eternity, since the Afghan government is essentially broke?
What if, instead, we went cold turkey on our obsession with training Afghans? For one thing, you’d promptly wipe out more than a quarter of that $40 billion the House leadership wants cut and many more billions for years to come. (And that doesn’t even take into account all the saveable American dollars going down the tubes in Afghanistan -- a recent report from the U.S. special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction suggested it adds up to $12 billion for the Afghan Army alone -- in graft, corruption, and pure incompetence.)
Think about it this way: Are we actually safer if we get rid of police, firefighters, and teachers here in the U.S., while essentially hiring hordes of police and military personnel to secure Afghanistan? I suspect you know how most Americans would answer that question.
Dumb Intelligence Runs Rampant
Here’s another way to approach both those $40 billion and $100 billion targets. Start with the budget for the labyrinthine U.S. Intelligence Community which is officially $80.1 billion. That, of course, is sure to prove an undercount. So, just for the heck of it, let’s take a wild guess and assume that the real figure probably edges closer to... $100 billion.
I know, I know, the Republican House majority will never agree to get rid of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, and neither will the Democrats. They’ll claim that Washington would be blinded by such an act -- although it’s no less reasonable to argue that, without the blinders of what we call “intelligence,” which is largely a morass of dead thinking about our world, our leaders might finally be able to see again. Nonetheless, in the spirit of compromise with a crew that hates the “federal bureaucracy” (until the words “national security” come up), how about cutting back from 17 intelligence outfits to maybe three? Let’s say, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency.
I’ll bet you’re talking an easy $40 to $50 billion dollars in savings right there -- and the cost of the job-retraining programs for the out-of-work intelligence analysts and operatives would be minimal by comparison.
According to a Washington Post series, “Top Secret America,” here are just a few of the things that you, the taxpayer, have helped our intelligence bureaucracy do: Produce 50,000 intelligence reports annually; create the sheer redundancy of “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, [to] track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks”; and, in the category of the monumental (as well as monumentally useless), construct “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work... since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space.”
Take just one example: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency which has 16,000 employees and a “black budget thought to be at least $5 billion per year.” Until now, you may not have known that such a crew was protecting your security, but you’re paying through the nose for its construction spree anyway. Believe it or not, as Gregg Easterbrook has pointed out, it now has a gleaming new, nearly Pentagon-sized headquarters complex rising in Virginia at the cost of $1.8 billion -- almost as expensive, that is, as the Freedom Tower now going up at Ground Zero in Manhattan.
Or let’s check out some smaller, distinctly choppable potatoes. Officially, America’s Iraq War is ending (even if in a Shiite-dominated state allied with Iran). All American military personnel are, at least theoretically, to leave the country by year’s end. Whether that happens or not, the Obama administration evidently remains convinced that it’s in our interest to prolong our effort to control that country. As a result, the planned “civilian” presence left behind to staff the three-quarters-of-a-billion-dollar citadel of an “embassy” the U.S. built in downtown Baghdad and various consular outposts will look uncomfortably like a mini-army.
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Memo to Washington......you can't buy friends......you have to earn them.
Another very quick and relatively painless (for most of us) way to significantly reduce the budget deficit would be to raise taxes on the upper 10% of income earners (corporate and private) in the United States. I am not certain of the exact figures, but this strategy might well reduce the budget deficit within a single generation.
This is why we need to have our own Egypt here. "
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YOU don't represent "we". Now go back to the mud hut outhouse in your own country and stop inserting your Moscow sentiment into US domestic issues.
I am with the "left" on the idea that the wealthy in this country should be taxed more heavily, and that the big corporations should not be getting the huge tax breaks they currently enjoy.
I am with the "right" to a degree regarding "entitlement programs." I believe that these programs are necessary to help a portion of our population, but I also see too many people "playing the system" - people who are perfectly capable of helping themselves instead of sucking off the tax payers.
I'm willing to bet the best approach to "cutting entitlement programs" - like Aid To Families With Dependent Children (this includes money for housing and utilities, Medicaid and food stamps) is to begin drug testing ALL applicants. Too many people I know are on the "dole" simply because the system is easy to "work" - and they sit on their backsides smoking dope (that they sold their food stamps for) or selling dope because "the government doesn't give them enough." So, if these people come up positive on a drug test ONCE, they should be banned from the rolls for a minimum of three years.
Take away the "entitlement programs" for big corporations, and make the welfare abusers accountable. Leave the middle class alone - we are the ones who are working to make this country work!
In that sense, the fact that unions are now under seige on the State level is as much due to Federal Democrats as it is State Republicans, since it was Slick Willie who passed all those imbalanced trade deals, and it's been Barack Obama who's continued to perpetuate them.
The theory of absolute advantage is pushing workers to compete globally for jobs, so you would expect there to be downward pressure in the domestic market for wages to fall, for unions to dissolve, for social safety nets to be shrunk, for environmental and safety standards to be obliterated. The free market's looking to match the standards set in China.
That's fact. It's not going to stop.
Instead of going after workers, unions, poor, elderly, children and the Middle Class.
Just like power plants and cell phone towers, everybody wants power and cell coverage, but when its time to build them ... Not In My Back Yard!!!!
Democrats and Republicans alike arcross the board on the Federal level are growing the deficit.
That's FACT.
State politicians aren't responsible looking out for the welfare of the GDP. If Chris Christie or Andrew Cuomo were in Washington he'd be just like anybody else there - growing the deficit, not cutting it - just like John Boehner and Barack Obama ...
You can't JUST talk cuts to Washington, who are responsible ALSO responsible for the welfare of the economy. They'll just write you all off as idiots who can't handle complex reasoning.
There's a reason that paltry $100 billion got whittled down to $40 bil, and it's not lack of resolve. I'm trying to help you not sound so ignorant ... it's kind of beneath the stature of the media ... to not appreciate the big picture ...
Politicians are politicians - they play to the crowd. People say they want cuts, but if you prompt them to prioritize without bothering to try and explain the degree of tension between cutting and growing, only 7% of people won't choose jobs over cuts.
If people think cuts are more important than jobs, then you need to make that clear to Washington that you understand the interplay ... nobody ever does ...
We're in the mess because of Keynesian economics being over-leveraged by both parties over the past 60 years +/-. If you think that somehow, Keynes can deliver us from our woes at this point, you are delusional.