Obama Will Cut Waste & Inefficiency in Defense by Jacking it Through the Roof
The time for action is over, the time for bullshit is now.
President Obama talking today:
"We've got to look at everything, including our security spending, in order to achieve the goals that we need."
White House and Pentagon officials later confirmed that Obama was proposing another $400 billion in cuts on top of the savings projected over the next decade in the administration's fiscal 2012 budget. The already-detailed cuts would produce more than $400 billion in savings through fiscal 2021, officials said.
And in his 2012 budget proposal (table S-3) lays out security spending that rises from $815 billion in 2012 to $1.039 trillion in 2021.
Now, I realize that I'm just simple English major, but what part of "already-detailed cuts" am I missing? I look foward to a decade in which my salary gets "cut" by 27 percent.
Obama's words yesterday about the deficit (to call them a speech is really giving them far more credit than they merit) was precisely what we should have expected from a president who took an incomplete last year on what is arguably the single-most basic task of that office: pushing a budget through. That he failed to do while his party controlled both houses of Congtress is not simply historic (only time it's happened since new budgeting rules were put into place in 1974) but getting right up there with NPSM of the past.
I am no fan of the Paul Ryan budget alternative and I hope that doesn't come into reality either (largely because of its basic unreality when it comes to a mismatch between outlays and revenues). But even his leave-security-alone budget only raises that line item to $838 billion in 2021.
Did my grandparents emigrate to America so their grandkids could live in an America where a Republican spendthrift proposes spending less money that we don't have on "security" that we don't need than a Democrat? I hope so, cuz this is America in 2011 and, apparently, 2021.
