We always had limited expectations for the debt deal. We didn’t think that if Republicans pushed the showdown beyond any deadline, Democrats would buckle and endorse a balanced-budget amendment. We did think Republicans could get cuts in exchange for an increase in the debt limit, and they did. In the first phase of the two-tier plan, they got spending caps that will limit the growth of discretionary spending over time for a $900 billion reduction from what Washington was planning to spend. The second phase aims to cut at least another $1.2 trillion, meeting Speaker John Boehner’s goal of achieving cuts roughly equal to the total increase in the debt limit of more than $2 trillion.
But the details matter. As they have emerged over the last days or so, they are worrisome, especially as they pertain to defense. The White House claims that $350 billion will be cut from defense in the first round. Republicans dispute this. What no one disagrees about is that defense is on the line for half of the automatic cuts that will be triggered if a supercommittee charged with coming up with at least another $1.2 trillion in cuts fails to produce, or if Congress doesn’t pass its recommendations. This would mean a roughly $500 billion reduction utterly disconnected from any strategic considerations. Republicans on the committee — the parties get six appointees each, three from each house — will be negotiating with a gun to the head of the Pentagon. Liberal priorities such as Social Security and Medicaid are exempted, and Medicare cut-backs are strictly limited.
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It is imperative that Republicans get their most knowledgeable and solid members on the committee, no matter how they voted on the final deal. In the House, the names Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, and Dave Camp come to mind. In the Senate, Jeff Sessions, Jon Kyl, and Pat Toomey. (Sessions, the budget chairman in the Senate, has been an one-man wrecking crew for rotten budget deals, demolishing the Gang of Six proposal, for instance, piece by piece.) Republicans should not get dragged into endless backroom negotiations that allow Democrats — as is their wont — to tell their press how far-reaching and responsible their plan is, when in fact they do not have one. Republicans should make public a serious first step toward entitlement reform without blinking on tax increases.
But the supercommittee is almost guaranteed to fail in agreeing to any large deficit reduction, for the same reasons that months of wrangling did not lead to a grand bargain: The parties’ positions are too far apart. We should assume, then, that the automatic cuts are likely to become law.
That does not mean that they will happen. Future Congresses will have their say, and it is hard to believe that they will accept a ten-year budget path set now. This bill will, however, establish the default settings for federal spending. Liberals who want more domestic discretionary spending will have to get legislation through both chambers of Congress and past the president’s desk. So too for conservatives who want to restore defense spending.
If the automatic cuts become law, restoring defense spending is exactly what we hope Republicans try to do. The cuts would be deep, and the politically easiest places to make savings will be in end-strength, procurement, and training.
It was always certain that any debt deal would only be the starting place, not the end point for a conservative fiscal agenda, requiring much more political combat to control and shape the federal budget. The make-up of the automatic cuts — negotiated at the last minute, behind closed doors with no thought to matching Pentagon budgets to national security — makes that truer than ever.
So now comes the revelation! Was this not apparent to all, even to those that supported this disastrously empty, and dangerous to national security, bill? The markets showed yesterday what they thought of all this. Incredible that so many well meaning conservatives bought this tripe. Limbaugh is correct, along with Mark Steyn and Andy McCarthy- a total waste of time- and we are running out of time.
The American People are getting whipsawed by both the Free Lunch - Free War Democrats and Free War - Free Lunch Republicans.
From the Democrats, every incidental dime cut from bloated domestic programs is "Slashing".
While from the Republicans, any dime cut from the Leviathan Military-Security complex is "hollowing out"
About Defense cuts, Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawerence Korb shows that the Defense budget has also seen hyper-growth over the last decade, even without a Soviet enemy:
Cost-is-no-object overruns is the DOD acquisition model. Why isn't NR screaming blood murder about that normative practice?
The Super-committee is indeed another pathetic Congressional contrivance. However the NR recommendation to back door Military-Security plus ups stinks because it's not zero sum. Just more discredited Bushism. I.e., we'll just spend money now and figure out how to pay for it later.
If you want it that bad, have the guts to raise taxes to pay for it.
And re: "The cuts would be deep, and the politically easiest places to make savings will be in end-strength, procurement, and training."
What NRO is saying is that the Republican members on the Super-committee would be too stupid and too impotent to steer any Military-Security cuts in a rational way.
And that assumed feckless stupidity means that DOD spending should continue to be open-ended while the rest of the American economy falls off the table.
These are just more inchoate talking points for the newly lionized but incongruous Macro Rubio.
National defense, one of the few things specifically identified as a government responsibility, is afforded less protection from cuts than entitlement programs.
Don't bet on the military coming through this without substantial cuts. Remember that this 'Super Congress' will be made up of people who can't agree on anything. Consequently, the automatic cuts are likely to happen and they are designed to fall heavily on our military.
The cuts will leave us with a hollowed out military that will be unable to defend this nation against an advesary like China. No one thought that Japan was capable of taking us on before December 7th, 1941 but you know how that turned out. We will suffer a self inflicted wound and we will rue the day that this decision was made.
Entitlement checks will always trump defense with the inevitable consequences. When we face the Chinese military in the Pacific and are defeated with great loss in American soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, remember this day.
Look, I largely agree with your larger point, but I'm sorry, China is not much of a military concern. This is true for a variety of reasons, but they mostly fall into one of two categories: China is militarily weak, and China is not miliarily aggressive. (Please don't misread me to say China is NO concern--I'm just saying that a shooting war with China is not one of our principle strategic concerns.)
Any, btw, your example of China only illustrates my point. Japan wasn't capable of taking us on, and at no time did they ever represent any real military threat to us. They pulled off one reasonably effective sneak attack, but, then, as we saw on 9/11, that can be done by groups that don't even rise to the level of a nation-state. Individual Japanese military personel fought with discipline and courage, but that could not change the fact that the Pacific conflict was about as lopsided as the British-Italian one was--and that was while we were devoting most of our attention to Germany.
Clearly, the precedent that budget cutting should be split 50-50 between defense and non-defense is insanity, and should be rejected at the earliest opportunity. Given that our deficit spending is presently about 40% of the budget, and military spending is about 20%, that formula leads to zeroing out military spending entirely.
That said, there is something to be said for alternating periods of expansion and contraction of military spending. Like any government program, wasteful military programs prosper in times of prosperity. A few years of belt-tightening are a useful way to chase out some of that.
Said it before, I'll say it again. Continuing Resolution Debate II: Return of the Boneheads.
GOP caved on making the Bush tax cuts permanent, caved on the continuing resolution and effectively caved on the debt limit. Every time it's "we got the best we could, gotta save the ammo for the next fight."
And when we GET to "the next fight", the same thing happens. The supercommittee will meet, do nothing, triggering huge defense cuts and leaving entitlements essentially untouched (Medicare is limited to no more than a 2% cut by the committee). Oh by the way, the committee's recommendations only need a simple majority, no amendments, no filibusters allowed.
And what will the GOP say? "We got the best we could, time to save the ammo for the next fight. Then we're REALLY gonna get tough!"
Anybody want a bridge? I got one. Cheap.
And spare me this "we only have x amount of the government" baloney. Democrats managed to stymie quite a bit of the GOP agenda when the GOP had ALL THREE branches of government.
The 45-year average defense outlay is 5.2% of GDP. Over the last decade, which obviously includes two wars, defense outlays have increased from approximately 3% to 5% of GDP. If this indicates "hyper-growth" in the defense budget, what does this say about entitlement spending that increased from 7% to 10% of GDP over the same period?
"And that assumed feckless stupidity means that DOD spending should continue to be open-ended while the rest of the American economy falls off the table."
In the Obama 2012 budget, entitlement programs represent 58% of the budget and defense 19%. At the average historic revenue level of 18% of GDP, entitlements will consume all revenue by 2049. And you're concerned about open-ended defense spending?
This country was founded with the idea of federal government as a protector of freedom, and it will die as a common service provider.
Then PAY for it. You want more weapons? Call for tax increases to PAY for them. You want perpetual War, raise taxes now to PAY for them.
Like it or not, we have a two party system. Constitutional arguments don't mean squat when talking turkey. If the Republicans back door more Defense spending, the Democrats will back door more domestic spending.
Store's closed. No Free Lunch - No Free War. PAY for them both.
P.S. And why don't you actually read Korb's numbers and tell us where he's wrong...
SteveM, agreed! I hear 'conservative' pundits like the 'great one' lash out at callers that even suggest that there could be waste in the military. How is it that the military budget increased 23% ($117B) from 2007 to 2010? We were fighting the same wars in 2010 that we fought in 2007.
There is no sacred cow in the federal government that couldn't slash 10% from thier budget, today. In 2008 I took a 20% pay cut so my company could avoid layoffs. I survived.
Yes the details are “worrisome” (a word I loathe in the political context since it is usually uttered by politicians when they feel the need to object, but also intend on doing nothing). Did you expect anything different?
-This deal will cut defense while not touching entitlements.
-Taxes will go up since the Bush tax cuts will expire.
-The deficit will increase every year despite the “cuts”.
No amount of fancy words will change the fact that this deal is a disaster. We needed a reversal of course. We got the status quo. I don’t know if Democrats or Repbulicans won, but America lost.
I will ask a question to NRO readers for the fourth time in a week. The political reality is that the vast majority of the public - including a solid majority of Tea Party supporters - will not support cuts in entitlements to the degree required to restore fiscal sanity. No fantasies allowed about how the public can be persuaded to believe otherwise - like it or not, this is the fact.
Question to conservatives: what is more important to you - maintaining what you consider to be adequate defense spending, or minimizing the tax burdens of the highest income, most asset rich citizens?
No supply-side fantasies allowed either about how cutting taxes always so stimulates economic activity that the tax cuts are self-financing. No empirical evidence justifies that economic theology.
False dichotomy - it's not an either/or situation. Minimizing EVERYONE'S tax burden should be the goal, and that can only be achieved by cutting spending on unconstitutional abrogations fostered by the Left.
SteveM: You want medicare, medicaid, ss, then pay for it. Most people receive far more benefits than they paid into these systems. What is eating us alive in unrestrained growth isn't the military it is health care costs.
I still have trouble understanding why conservatives who are normally in favor of limited government and Democrats who are normally in favor of Statism switch sides so quickly when it comes to defense. It's a sad day when we adopt Wilson's "Make the World Safe for Democracy" mantra. We're broke, and the Right gets goosebumps over the prospect of going from having six times as many aircraft carriers as China to only five times as many. Hell, if we don't solve this debt crisis, we won't even be able to police the world anymore!
I suppose this ideological commitment to raising defense spending is a relic of the Cold War? Yes, Defense is a constitutionally mandated function. That doesn't mean we have to spend 4% of GDP on it! For most of this country's history, we didn't even have a standing army! This rigid commitment to defense should really be rethought. I, for one, think that this debt crisis is so drastic that I would even be willing to support some temporary tax increases as part of a serious (I.E. Andy McCarthy would approve) deal, but reasonable people can differ about that. But defense? How much should we spend? 10% of GDP? 20%? 50%?
Nobody in the Defense Department cares about how much salt I eat, or what kind of light bulbs I use, or my car's fuel economy. or whether or not my health insurance pays for birth control. That's why it's perfectly consistent with conservative ideology to support defense spending while opposing most other government spending. It's less about the money than about the freedom. But even if we talk about the money, the Defense budget is about 4% of GDP; significantly less than 10%, 20% or 50% and less than half of what federal entitlement spending takes.
