David Brooks Takes A Sip Of Reality

David Brooks is usually clueless but he at least dips a toe in the cold sea of reality today.  He rightly observes that voters like Medicare and Medicaid and that any serious cuts are unlikely.  

Americans don’t particularly like government, but they do want government to subsidize their health care. They believe that health care spending improves their lives more than any other public good. In a Quinnipiac poll, typical of many others, Americans opposed any cuts to Medicare by a margin of 70 percent to 25 percent.
In a democracy, voters get what they want, so the line tracing federal health care spending looks like the slope of a jet taking off from LaGuardia. Medicare spending is set to nearly double over the next decade. This is the crucial element driving all federal spending over the next few decades and pushing federal debt to about 250 percent of G.D.P. in 30 years.
There are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up with this spending rise. The Democrats had their best chance in a generation to raise revenue just now, and all they got was a measly $600 billion over 10 years. This is barely a wiggle on the revenue line and does nothing to change the overall fiscal picture.

He also observes correctly that the only place the money can come from is the Defense Department.

So far, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the Medicare vise. But that is about to change. Oswald Spengler didn’t get much right, but he was certainly correct when he told European leaders that they could either be global military powers or pay for their welfare states, but they couldn’t do both.
Europeans, who are ahead of us in confronting that decision, have chosen welfare over global power. European nations can no longer perform many elemental tasks of moving troops and fighting. As late as the 1990s, Europeans were still spending 2.5 percent of G.D.P. on defense. Now that spending is closer to 1.5 percent, and, amid European malaise, it is bound to sink further.
The United States will undergo a similar process. The current budget calls for a steep but possibly appropriate decline in defense spending, from 4.3 percent of G.D.P. to 3 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
But defense planners are notoriously bad at estimating how fast postwar military cuts actually come. After Vietnam, the cold war and the 1991 gulf war, they vastly underestimated the size of the cuts that eventually materialized. And those cuts weren’t forced by the Medicare vise. The coming cuts are.

I do have to take exception with Brook's claim that this is why Chuck Hagel was chosen.  It is inevitable that military spending will be cut and Hagel has been a trusted Obama adviser from the beginning.   Empires most often end not when they are defeated in battle but when they are defeated in their treasuries.  That is where the United States is now and a smaller US footprint in the world is a given.

The Military Mission and Budget Talks

A couple of days ago I lamented that cuts in the Defense Budget seemed to be absent in the budget discussions.  But it goes much deeper than that.  What we really need is a discussion of foreign policy goals and the mission of military.  While I never approved of the United States being the World's policeman it should be obvious to anyone not living in a bubble we can no longer afford it.  Is a heavy U.S. presence in the Middle East in the national interest?  And by that I mean is it in the interest of the majority of the American citizens not multi-national corporations.  The answer is no!  The people of the Middle East hate us because we have been messing in their affairs for years supporting tyrants and dictators who supported corporations.  Osama bin Laden himself said 911 was because the U.S. had a military presence in Saudi Arabia.  The United States spends more money on the military than the other top 13 countries comnbined and for what?

Ed Kilgore:

What with the entire national political debate being perpetually centered on fiscal priorities, it’s truly striking how little attention is being devoted (outside a few left-wing or libertarian precincts) to the option of a significant retrenchment of U.S. defense commitments. Yes, there’s plenty of talk, mostly from Republicans, about the deflationary impact of letting the scheduled defense spending sequestration go through (on this subject they are quite happy to be Keynesians). But after all, if there was a consensus that the country’s mammoth military advantage over all adversaries potential and actual was sufficiently safe (particularly at a time when other countries are struggling to make ends meet as well) to allow for a different strategy, we could happily fight over whether to devote the “hegemony dividend” to deficit reduction, domestic spending or tax cuts. And it’s worth remembering that it’s defense spending cuts without significant changes in the Pentagon’s missions or force structure that run the risk of underfunding actual security needs.

I think it is time we look at significant changes to the Pentagon's mission.  We can no longer afford to be the World's policeman and we really haven't done a very good job of it anyway.
Charles Kenny:

Yet even China currently has but one aircraft carrier, which doesn’t have any aircraft stationed on it. It’s a third-hand boat, a hand-me-down from the Soviet Union to the Ukraine, which China picked up at a yard sale in 1998. Meanwhile, the U.S. has 20 carriers—all of which come with actual planes.
..........
As Tufts professor Michael Beckley points out, the U.S. now “formally guarantees the security of more than 50 countries,” which means the U.S. has more allies in the world than at any time in its history. More broadly, war between nation states has been incredibly rare since 1945. Europe is the most obvious beneficiary of Pax Americana: Before today, the last time the Rhine had gone this long without being crossed by armies with hostile intent was more than 2,000 years ago, according to economic historian Brad DeLong. The painful and often violent process of building independent nation states out of colonies was often stoked into civil war by the competing powers of the Cold War. But with the decline of that global struggle, and the growing legitimacy of the new countries, even civil wars are on the wane.
It’s not just land wars that are relics of the 20th century. There’s little incentive for the Chinese to block sea lanes in Asia, for instance, since much of the traffic going through is on the way to or from China itself—the world’s largest exporting nation. Similarly, blocking the Straits of Hormuz would be economic suicide for the Iranians—if they could even manage it. That leaves pirates, operating off rubber dinghies using knockoff AK-47s off the coast of Somalia. How many new $7 billion guided missile stealth-destroyers does the U.S. need to take them out?

 We simply can't afford to do this anymore.  We need to do some nation building alright but here in the United States.  If cutting defense spending will have a negative impact on the economy why won't not spending on infrastructure here have the same negative impact.  If we can't afford to help senior citizens in this country we can't afford to guarantee the security of other countries.  If we can't afford to repair our infrastructure we can't afford to make the world safe for multi-national corporations most of which pay no taxes.

The Military Industrial Complex

Who is in control of the budget talks?  One thing that hardly anyone from either party talks about is cuts in defense (offense) spending and most of them are talking about cuts to medicare and Social Security.  As Matt Yglesias points out that not the way the American people see it.  

Defense spending reductions, meanwhile, are much less popular. There's a nontrivial bloc of congressional Democrats who favors major reductions, but that's not a stance embraced by party leadership or recent presidential candidates. But as a recentEconomist/YouGov poll confirms—key result replicated above—public opinion is pretty different. An overwhelming 71 percent of the population says it favors spending cuts to reduce the budget deficit, but cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are all unpopular. Defense cuts, by contrast, poll pretty well. The modern-day version of the guns or butter choice is guns or grandma's hospital bills, and the public clearly prefers grandma's hospital bills.

At The American Conservative Jon Basil Utley thinks that just eliminating waste at the Pentagon could do more to reduce the deficit than doing away with a few tax deductions but even that gets little but lip service from DC politicians.

Compare these with another study that breaks down all national-security costs. Those total some $1.2 trillion—far more than just the Pentagon’s costs, if one includes the CIA, veterans programs, pensions, interest on war debts, etc., but not the Afghan War, which is another hundred billion. The military establishment’s waste is so extraordinary that anyone in Washington who defends it either plans for America to start more wars (e.g., neoconservatives) or is on the take in some way—perhaps subsidized by a think tank getting money from military contractors. A good overall view of defense spending is by budget expert Winslow Wheeler, “The Defense Budget: Ignorance Is Not Bliss.” And this does not include big-ticket items like the F-35—scheduled to reach a trillion dollars for an average five hours of flying time per week over its lifetime—or a 12th aircraft carrier battle group. Would tax-paying Americans really prefer a new fighter plane, when America already dominates the world’s skies and seas, rather than have their home mortgage interest deduction?
The CIA and other intelligence agencies cost some $55 billion that we know about. In 2010 some $27 billion more was spent on military intelligence programs. Waste is incredible. The Washington Post ran a series of articles about waste and duplication of efforts at the many intelligence agencies. It pointed out among other numbers that some 50,000 intelligence reports are issued yearly. No congressman, to my knowledge, demanded an investigation. A recent interesting information tidbit was how Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has Air Force planes fly him home to California every weekend. The news came to light when he transferred to the Pentagon, which publishes such information. Earlier at the CIA he did the same, but it was a secret expense. The exploding cost of homeland security is also somewhat hidden: for example, airline passengers pay for much of the government’s costs in higher fares.

Utley links to The defense budget: Ignorance is not bliss by Winslow Wheeler which is a must read.

Polling from Pew and Gallup reveals major public misconceptions about the defense budget. Fifty-eight percent of Americans know that Pentagon spending is larger than any other nation, but almost none know it is up to seven times that of China. Most had no idea the defense budget is larger than federal spending for education, Medicare or interest on the debt.


The scurrilous in Washington promote the misimpression of an under-funded Pentagon. They imply it is smaller than during the Cold War by saying it was at 8 percent of gross domestic product in the late 1960s, but only 4 percent of GDP now. Therefore, it’s gone down and is now low, right?

Some use hyperventilated rhetoric to pressure for more defense dollars. Sadly, this category now must include Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who termed “catastrophic” the recommendations of the Obama deficit commission to merely maintain defense spending at its post-WWII high, and who deemed a “crisis” the idea of a 1 percent — $5 billion — reduction in the 2011 defense budget compared to 2010.

The defense budget is untouchable because the military industrial complex is a major contributor of reelection money.  This is nothing new.  In the early 70s those in the intelligence community knew the Soviet Union was collapsing - no, Ronald Reagan was not responsible for the collapse. 

Tolstoy would look at the assertion that Reagan brought down the Evil Empire and say: no he didn’t. The individual decisions by millions of Russians, Poles, Latvians, Georgians, Germans, etc. brought down the Evil Empire, and the relationship between those individual actions and the action of any one man is obscure – and, moreover, anything Reagan did that was significant was overwhelmingly likely to have been done by someone else in his place at that time, because those actions were forced choices, driven by necessity, even if we don’t fully understand the laws thereof.

The hype of the threat from a rapidly failing Soviet Union allowed defense spending to remain inflated.  We see the same thing today except it is even more absurd this time because the threat is not from a world power but a number of bands of outlaws.

If "everything" is on the table then that must include dramatic cuts to defense spending but don't hold your breath.