The One has offered us middle class tax “relief” to the tune of $80 billion dollars per year (after allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire). His domestic spending plans will add another $130 billion in outflows, for a net hit to the public fisc of $210 billion per year on top of an inherited $400 billion budget deficit.
He says that he plans to close the gap via the perennially popular – if chimerical – method of “closing tax loopholes” (read: choosing new oxen to gore), as well as another $100 billion in spending cuts. Which must come, we presume, from discretionary accounts, roughly 38% of the total US budget in 2006 (the remainder going to so-called “mandatory” spending – social security, medicare and medicaid).
In the discretionary wedge are defense spending – about half of the discretionary total – with the majority of the remainder going to Health and Human Services, education, the VA and the State Department.
If we take for granted – and we probably should – that our President-select’s domestic policies don’t include hurling disbled veterans to the curb, gutting any of the HHS programs providing financial services to low income families, health and social science research, and the FDA (among 300 others), nor will he re-build bridges to the world at large by cutting State Department’s pot of foreign largesse, we are left to wonder where that $100 billion will come from.
The US Department of Defense has a 2009 budget of a little over $500 billion, not including such “off budget” expenses as two wars, one of which we have won but whose gains are not yet consolidated, one of which, it is generally agreed, we must win. Drawing the war in Iraq to responsible close – despite his previous oratory, I predict Obama will not want a disaster on his first FITREP – will not generate reccurrent savings to the budget even before attempting to recapitalize worn out gear.
But Barney Frank wants to cut defense spending by 25%. Twent-five percent of $500 billion is $125 billion. Hey, that’s $25 billion to spare!
When it comes to defense, there are two Barack Obamas in this race. There is the candidate who insists, as he did last year in an article in Foreign Affairs, that “a strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace”; pledges to increase the size of our ground forces by 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 Marines while providing them with “first-rate equipment, armor, incentives and training”; and seems to be as gung-ho for a surge in Afghanistan as he was opposed to the one in Iraq.
And then there is the candidate who early this year recorded an ad for Caucus for Priorities, a far-left outfit that wants to cut 15% of the Pentagon’s budget in favor of “education, healthcare, job training, alternative energy development, world hunger [and] deficit reduction.”
In The Spectator, columnist Melanie Phillips asks, “Is America Really Going to Do This?”
The impact of the financial crisis on the American presidential election has somewhat obscured the most important reason why the prospect of an Obama presidency is giving so many people nightmares. This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west.
Probably not. Obama has promised to raise new levies of ground forces, just in time to bring them home. And they’ll have to be equipped. Probably he’ll just raise taxes some more. On, you know: The rich. On account of all that time they spend in their basement vaults, running their fingers through their ill-gotten gains. Like that Scrooge McDuck guy. That’s some of that ol’ timey politickin’, and when you hear a politician talking about “spreading the wealth”, or any of the other euphemisms used for redistribution of money from those who have the talent, drive and risk tolerance to make it while creating value (and jobs) to those who don’t, what you’re really talking about is the politics of envy and class warfare. Me against thee, and brother can you spare a dime? Because I think you can.
That’s how you heal the divisions in our society.
And anyway, class warfare has much more immediate emotional benefits, especially when contrasted to winning that other kind; the one you fight against a brutal enemy who after all is only seeking to impose his own brand of tryanny more generally. In class warfare the enemy is so much closer to hand, and powerless in the face of the state’s coercive power.
It’s so much better when your enemies don’t shoot back.
I have a cunning plan for getting the money we need to give to the One! Pass a law forbidding Americans to own gold and insist that those greedy b@stards that own gold have to turn it in to the government owned banks at 5 cents on the dollar and charge them a processing fee of $2000 for executing the transaction.
I plan to move to Galt’s er, Gordo’s Gulch
I seem to recall Woodrow Wilson having tried something similar, Curtis. Worked really well, too, as I recall…
This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west.
You know, I’m no fan of destroying the American military. But what I find fascinating about comments like this is the assumption that America = defender of the West, and that no one else has any will, capability or responsibility to do so.
So, someone should save Darfur? No problem. Send the German or French or Italian or Spanish or Portugese or Swiss armies. Of course, that means that they’d actually have armies and actually have the will to put them into harm’s way.
But to do so they’d have to take money away from their social programs, the same social programs they criticize us for not having so that we will have a military capability that they’re all so willing to volunteer for jobs that they don’t want to do themselves.
I guess it’s hard to get people to be willing to sacrifice (in one fashion or another) for a country when the dominant meme is that the country owes you a living rather than you owing the country.
Obama is over promising on the health care front as well, but what is new. Flight Lead and I went to hear the head of Wellpoint Health speak last night — big borex for our house, with nothing new said. That spawned a conversation on Obama’s chimerical promise of “making health care affordable” through electronic health records — to the tune of $2500/yr. per family in savings. Problem is, as the Flight Lead points out from her health care management position, is that the savings are well in the out years — probably ten years out before you see a net dime, because it isn’t just installing the technology, it is in a complete rethinking of almost every procedure in a new milieu.
But who will hold him accountable? The fawning press?
That $210 billion? Going to be paid in “visionary dollars” brought in by “hope and change,” those darling twins.
Marianne