Sunday, February 27, 2011

These days, everybody luvs talking about the budget. Republicans, who broke the bank during the Reagan and W. years, lecture us all about the dangerous costs of spending money on civilians in this country—unless that money comes in the form of enormous tax breaks for the plutocrat community. Democrats, for the most part, are either jumping on board or else timidly offering up their favorite programs for only partial destruction. Great.

Obama wants across-the-board domestic cuts, and gets hammered by Republicans for supporting spending increases in some cases.

But what about Afghanistan? What about defense? Hardly anyone in politics is even talking about cutting the defense budget, while we're all signed up for what I'm sure will be another four excellent years—at least—in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we've still got 50,000 soldiers in Iraq. I doubt there are serious plans to ever leave either of these countries entirely.

Instead of signing us all up for four more years in Afghanistan, Obama should have begun a withdrawal from that country. The best reasons for doing this are not, in my opinion, strictly economic, but nevertheless doing so would have great economic benefits—especially for all of the supposed fiscal conservatives, who are no doubt wringing their hands over the deficit. Don't they care that we've spent over $300 billion in Afghanistan, and over a trillion dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan combined?

Our defense budget is currently over $600 billion, and that doesn't even include money for the wars. Meanwhile, cuts are being proposed to infrastructure, to Pell grants, to nutrition programs, environmental protection, and regulatory agencies responsible for maintaining clean drinking water and air.

I hardly have expertise on budget issues, so I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the current budget is spending more on defense than ever before. But this doesn't stop some people from resisting any cuts to a budget that already appears to be, by any account, superginormousgantuan. 

We're just hastening our own decline with this approach—any idiot can see that.

But as is always the case with states in decline, we're not all declining. There are still people who are winning from all of this. As usual, Frank Rich describes it better than just about anybody:

That’s not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right’s agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks. The bankrupt moral equation codified in the Bush era — that tax cuts tilted to the highest bracket were a higher priority even than paying for two wars — is now a given. The once-bedrock American values of shared sacrifice and equal economic opportunity have been overrun.

In this bigger picture, the Wisconsin governor’s fawning 20-minute phone conversation with a prankster impersonating the oil billionaire David Koch last week, while entertaining, is merely a footnote. The Koch Industries political action committee did contribute to Walker’s campaign (some $43,000) and did help underwrite Tea Party ads and demonstrations in Madison. But this governor is merely a petty-cash item on the Koch ledger — as befits the limited favors he can offer Koch’s mammoth, sprawling, Kansas-based industrial interests.

Look to Washington for the bigger story. As The Los Angeles Times recently reported, Koch Industries and its employees form the largest bloc of oil and gas industry donors to members of the new House Energy and Commerce Committee, topping even Exxon Mobil. And what do they get for that largess? As a down payment, the House budget bill not only reduces financing for the Environmental Protection Agency but also prohibits its regulation of greenhouse gases.

Getting out of Afghanistan and cutting defense would be the best ways to cut the budget, but I think Rich is right—most people in Congress aren't the slightest bit interested in cutting the deficit in the first place. Indeed, they want to "starve the beast," deliberately bankrupt the country in order to force reductions in government services and, most importantly, cuts in the regulatory power of the state.

And now they get to call themselves "budget-conscious." What a joke! What a sad, awful joke.

While most of the Republicans in Congress have been behaving despicably, that is no reason to let Obama off the hook. Obama had a real opportunity to put the Republicans on the defensive with respect to both budget-cutting and Afghanistan by thinking boldly and getting us out of that quagmire more quickly. Instead, he keeps us there for at least four more years, and proposes a budget that....makes absolutely no cuts in defense.

Excuse me, but why not put defense on the table? Why not force the Republicans (and their "Blue Dog" fellow-travelers) to at least articulate why the supposed party of fiscal conservatism, the party which supports cutting meager millions in foreign aid, is cool with blowing billions on defense and on the occupation of Afghanistan.


For a new generation of wars, we've got a new generation of war pigs eating at the public trough—and neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem very interested in slowing that down 

It's looking increasingly likely that things, whenever they end, are not going to end well for us in Afghanistan. It might be nice to at least have enough money to bring our soldiers back once we're done over there.