Sarah Palin has already acquired a reputation of being George W. Bush or Dan Quayle in a skirt. In other words, there is a suspicion that there isn’t a lot of activity between her ears. Her latest comment on the bloated U.S. “defense” budget won’t dispel those suspicions.
Palin has made it her mission to dissuade Tea Party activists from making the $700 billion military budget a candidate for cuts to reduce the enormous federal budget deficit. Even though the United States now spends as much on the military as the rest of the world combined, Sarah regards it as shockingly unpatriotic to think that the Pentagon might be able to get by on a mere $500 billion or $600 billion a year.
During a recent speech, she quoted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who had questioned the need for some of the U.S. Navy’s expensive weapons systems, including maintaining 12 aircraft carrier battle groups. Noting that destroyers cost as much as $6 billion each, submarines $7 billion, and aircraft carriers $11 billion, he asked: “Do we really need [even] more strike groups for another 30 years when no other country has more than one?”
It was a very good question that deserved a serious, thoughtful answer. But what was Palin’s brilliant response? ” Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes we can and yes we do, because we must.”
So, no possible enemy that the United States faces–now or in the foreseeable future–can match even a small fraction of our conventional military power, America’s free-riding allies in Europe and East Asia are slashing their already anemic defense budgets (thereby expecting the United States to bear an even greater share of the burden for global order and security), and we’re running a budget deficit of more than $1.4 trillion this year, but we can’t cut even a dime from our military budget. Right.
The best thing the Tea Party movement could do is to show the door to Sarah Palin and anyone who thinks the way she does.
The price tag for the government’s attempted rescue of the nation’s financial system, which has been a spectacular flop so far, is likely to run into trillions of dollars. Yet very few participants in the policy debate (with the exception of Libertarian Party presidential candidate Bob Barr) have talked about making even modest cuts in federal spending to offset this vast new expenditure. That is nothing short of irresponsible–and both major political parties are guilty.
It is imperative to jettison nonessential expenditures. There are certainly plenty of candidates among domestic programs, starting with agricultural subsidies–a great reverse wealth-transfer mechanism in which taxpayers of even modest means are forced to fatten the bank accounts of even wealthy farmers. I’m not an expert on wasteful and unnecessary domestic programs, so I will leave it to others to suggest additional cuts in what is clearly a target-rich environment.
If many of Washington’s domestic spending programs are luxuries we can no longer afford, that is doubly true of our military and foreign policy expenditures. Foreign aid programs are obvious candidates for elimination. America has spent nearly a trillion dollars (measured in 2008 dollars) over the past 60 years, and all too much of that money has simply gone into the coffers of corrupt politicians and their cronies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
But the wasteful spending goes far beyond foreign aid. The United States spends roughly as much on the military as the rest of the world combined. Promptly terminating the ill-advised crusade in Iraq would save $120 billion a year, but that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Our current annual military budget is nearly $700 billion. Advocates of such a vast sum should explain why we need to have not one but two expensive new jet fighter programs when the U.S. already has overwhelming superiority in air power and there is no serious military competitor on the horizon for the next two decades–and perhaps longer. At least one of those programs should be terminated. The same is true of the program to build the Virginia class submarine, a weapon system that was designed to counter a Soviet system that was never built.
And someone ought to explain why the United States needs to keep nearly 100,000 troops in Europe to guard wealthy allies more than 6 decades after the end of World War II and nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our trusty NATO allies, who have used the U.S. defense guarantee as an excuse to underinvest in their own defenses for decades, are now citing the global financial crisis as a reason to cut their already paltry military expenditures even further. But at the same time, they don’t want us to cut our military budget.
A similar situation exists on the other side of the world. The United States continues to subsidize the defense of South Korea, even though that country now has a population twice the size of its only adversary, communist North Korea, and an economy some 40 times larger.
It is time to expel the international military welfare queens in Europe and East Asia from the U.S. dole. We should have done that years ago, but the current financial squeeze makes that move not just desirable, but essential.