By the time you sit down for Thanksgiving dinner, the 12-member congressional supercommittee will have succeeded in meeting its November 23 deadline to approve a plan to shrink the budget deficit by at least $1.2 trillion over the next decade. Or it will have failed – and produced a turkey instead.
The Association of the United States Army packed hundreds of exhibitors into two halls the size of football fields at its annual convention. Companies from around the world came to the event, recently held at the Washington Convention Center, to sell the Army everything from mammoth tanks to micro-thin wires. Corporations such as Raytheon and KBR erected multi-level installations nearly big enough to generate their own zip code, complete with conference rooms and coffee bars.
Communities all over the United States are reeling from budget cuts. Military contractors, meanwhile, have remained fat and well-fed on the one part of federal spending that so far hasn’t been touched by budget-cutting fever: the Pentagon. One community recently decided to call attention to this disparity. In Montgomery County, a relatively wealthy Maryland suburb of Washington, DC, Peace Action Montgomery got together with a group of City Council members to craft a simple, straightforward resolution.
Republicans are willing to cut spending on Afghanistan and Iraq, but not military aid for Israel.
Some are arguing that the military budget can’t be cut because it will cost jobs. This summary of a 2009 study shows that, compared to other forms of federal spending, the military budget is a very poor job creator indeed.
Leon Panetta, the new Pentagon chief, got through his confirmation hearings the newfangled way: by revealing as little as possible about what he’d do in office. He tipped his hand a bit more last week by calling “completely unacceptable” the across-theboard military cuts planned in the event the next debt deal fails.
What’s labeled “cuts” aren’t necessarily actual cuts. They could just as easily mean slower increases.
The U.S. needs to repair the extreme imbalance in our security spending to strengthen our non-military security tools. This year’s Unified Security Budget would create that balance by getting serious about waste, reviewing roles and missions, and reforming the budget process.
A successor to the Stealth bomber is planned that would not only be capable of bearing nuclear weapons, but could fly pilotless.
I have a proposal: Let’s double US government funds devoted to promoting renewable energy. Let’s expand allocations for foreclosure prevention to help another million Americans keep their homes. Let’s launch a $10-billion infrastructure programme to repair crumbling roads and bridges. Let’s double the number of new maths and science teachers that President Obama hopes to train, bringing the total to 200,000. And let’s hire back all of those police officers fired by the city of Camden, New Jersey – already among the most dangerous places in the country before budget constraints compelled it to dismiss half of its police force in December.