Thursday, August 02, 2012

Cynicism.

OldNFO asks:
If Defense is only 20% of the budget, WHY is Defense taking 42-48% (depending on which set of numbers you want to believe) of the Sequestration cuts???
Because your vote-buying dollar goes a lot farther if you spend it on direct wealth redistribution, duh.

20 comments:

Bram said...

That - And Veterans tend to be very conservative voters, so why make more of them?

Shrimp said...

Let's not forget that the people who apparently dislike having a robust military also tend to be the same ones who want more of the wealth distribution, so long as it's being distributed from someone else.

Ironically, they also tend to be the ones that want our military to go stomp around in everyone's backyard solving crisis after crisis--Somalia in the 90's, for example--with no regard for cost or strategy. And that costs money, but...Bread not Bombs!!!11!

Anonymous said...

During the budget debate/clownfest, it was argued that the sequestration option had to be "they wouldn't dare" painful for both sides to force an actual decision.

THAT worked well...

Home on the Range said...

All these plans of the current administration to bring rigor to the economy, ignore the fact that they brought mortis as well.

Anonymous said...

Department of Defense needs to buy more Congress critters in the next budget cycle.

Gerry

Anonymous said...

Simple, Tam.

There are two parties, splitting the Congress roughly in half. They came together, and agreed that they would suffer roughly equally. The Democrats care about domestic/welfare spending, the Republicans care about military spending. And voila! In sequestration, 50% of the cuts come from military spending and 50% come from welfare spending.

If you think on it further, you'll realize that the Republicans got shafted (again) because they're so eeeaaaaager to play "nice" with the Dems. Military spending will take a bigger hit than welfare/domestic spending, when their respective chunks of the budget are accounted for.

They don't call it the Stupid Party for nothin', you know.

rickn8or said...

What Anonymous 10:26 said. Especially the last paragraph.

Cincinnatus said...

Actually, the reason is that this is what "entitlement" means under Federal budget law.

Anonymous said...

+1 on Brigid!

gfa

Anonymous said...

Chanced by your blog via ttag, loved reading it. Have a good day.
~G

Stuart the Viking said...

Duh... It's because stinky BUSH and his stupid immoral war! We should just cut the whole war budget and tax the baby killing rich people 100% to pay for it. That would fix everything.

s

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

I'm sure they feel that the money will be better spent on local police who, unlike the military, can be used to put down the opposition.

Anonymous said...

It's the same mentality that ensures that, if cuts are forced on a bureaucrat then, the cuts fall almost exclusively on the section that actually does the job that we, the tax payers, are paying for.

Here, the NHS is in disarray. Swinging cuts are required. So doctors, nurses, etc. are being cut left, right and centre. All the while senior management posts, administrative and boondoggle (anti-smoking, diversity, equality 'experts') have had not only no cuts, but they're recruiting new ones?!?

The rationale? Well one, a bureaucrat doesn't ever want to cut their personal fiefdom (status and money), and two, they hope by cutting those who do the job they'll get us to reconsider the cuts.

I say, sack the lot of them (the, literally, only time my hospital runs efficiently is on the holidays when all those 'necessary' and 'essential' management and administrative staff are away - who'd have thunk it?).

Look for something to happen which brings a shortfall in Defence capability to light. And then watch as the vast majority of the new appropriation is spent on increasing the bureaucrats instead of front-line troops and equipment.

Am I a cynic? Just a little!

Bubblehead Les. said...

Oh, they are just following the Proud and Honorable Tradition first started by Truman. After all, why spend money on the Military when the "War" is over? Just ask any Korean War Vet how well the U.S. was prepared in June 1950.

And if the Enemy hasn't decided to Quit, why, you just declare "Peace is at Hand", bring the Troops Home, and Fire them.

Worked for Nixon, Clinton and now the Anointed One.

Yep, Kipling's "Tommy" still holds True. Sad.

Borepatch said...

This is why we call them the Stupid Party.

Anonymous said...

"Because your vote-buying dollar goes a lot farther if you spend it on direct wealth redistribution, duh."

And as referenced in your prior post, add in the complicity of the BBC -or the NBC- and you've got yourself a dynasty...or at least a second term. And that's really all that matters.

PB

Paul, Dammit! said...

I'm going to go with Robin on this one.
Old-NFO probably knows better than anyone that defense spending is mostly welfare for shipbuilders and defense contractors to continue their cold-war level staffing and ensure that they'll have to get dragged by their hair into using business models that were formed after 1960. I can't speak on anything but naval budget issues with authority, but the Navy's method of setting budgets by designing equipment after construction already is underway, and then under-reporting spending so as to not attract the eyes of frugal spenders... well, it's a big joke, as is any one of the naval assets designed after 1990.

Derfel Cadarn said...

If the military budget actually represented "defense" costs and not invading foreign countries to tell them how to live the budget could cut be by 60% and still do what needs to be done. I want to live in a FREE country and I understand what defense means. No where in that description does it mention the over throw of other regimes. Whether we like it or not those are other peoples countries. Would we as Americans suffer such interference ?

Tam said...

Derfel Cadarn,

I'm not sure which issue of Mother Jones estimated the cost of the Global War on a Noun as representing sixty percent of the defense budget, but rest assured that "Meddling in Foreign Affairs" is always the LAST line item to go away.

Even during the depths of the Clinton-era cuts, our ops tempo included deployments to scenic tourist spots like Bosnia, Somalia, Haiti, and lots of other places apparently in need of being told how to run a country.

Anonymous said...

I typically don't get to worked up over defense spending since it is actually something that the constitution lists as the Fed's responsibility but we need to undertand what sequestration means.

If you and I say we are making budget cuts that means...oh I don't know actually spending less. In the land of pixie dust that just means means spending less that you had "projected" to spend in coming years. So instead of spending $5.3 trillion in 2013-2021we are going to spend $4.8 trillion. When adjusting for inflation the spending will actually be flat. And this doesn't account for funding for the war overseas.