The agreement in Washington to raise the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts has made a lot of people very unhappy. But the agreement had one important positive aspect: it created a historic opportunity for significant cuts in projected military spending.
Under the agreement, a joint House-Senate committee is supposed to propose, by Thanksgiving, $1.5 trillion of debt reduction (expenditures less revenues) over ten years.
Significant cuts in projected military spending are on the table. Indeed, if the joint committee doesn't agree on a plan or Congress doesn't enact it, $1.2 trillion in cuts in projected spending over ten years will be triggered, of which half must come from the military.
If the military cuts in the trigger mechanism take place, when added to the projected military cuts announced by the White House as part of this week's deal, total cuts in projected military spending would amount to $884 billion. This is very close to the $886 billion in military cuts agreed by the plan of the Senate's "Gang of Six," a plan endorsed by President Obama. It's in the ballpark of - but less than - the $960 billion in proposed military cuts of the Frank-Paul Sustainable Defense Task Force, the trillion dollars in proposed military cuts of the report of the president's deficit commission, the $1.1 trillion reduction in projected military spending proposed by the Domenici-Rivlin task force and the $1.2 trillion in military cuts recommended by the Cato Institute. Conservative Republican Sen. Tom Coburn says cutting the projected military budget by a trillion dollars over ten years is "not hard" and is "common sense."
In other words: cutting projected military spending by a trillion dollars over the next ten years has become politically plausible.
4 comments:
Well now , if you think about it , Obama has already destroyed the country from within. Why do we need a strong military ? We are defeated!
We are now a devoted muslim nation without borders. America , the jock-strap(supporter) for the world.
Christians , beware , muslims hate you.
We have learned a major step from Obama , "How to become a 3rd world nation is less than 2 years ,"must be a record.
People crack me up. You scream for spending cuts. Now the government (not obama, the debt compromise was heavily republican) wants to save money and decrease military spending by withdrawing us out of 2 wars that we shouldn't have been in for over ten years. But that is screamed at as a bad thing by obama-haters? It should be apparent to both parties that we don't need to be in afghanistan and iraq anymore.
People are too confused by the media and propaganda of the government to fathom the structure of the illegal government who rules over us.
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