Reason Writers Around Town: Shikha Dalmia on the Defense Cuts in the Debt Deal

This week's debt deal is the equivalent of administering a vitamin pill to a patient who is in need of radical surgery, notes Reason Foundation Senior Analyst Shikha Dalmia in her latest column at The Daily. The GOP's claim that it wangled $2.4 trillion in spending cuts for a $2.4 trillion-increase in the debt ceiling is a total lie. "That's because the debt ceiling applies over two years and the spending cuts over 10. This means that by 2013, Washington's spendocrats will have reached the new limit and will be back for more."

But if there is a silver lining to this sham deal, it is that the fiscal hawks in the GOP have opened defense spending up for discussion for the first time post-9-11:

"Neocons had managed the remarkable political feat of reversing America's post-Vietnam antipathy towards war, creating a presumption in favor of military engagement…They made the idea of America playing global cop intellectually respectable again."

But their open-ended defense agenda is no longer fiscally sustainable and the debt deal begins to confront that.

Go here to read the whole thing.