Republicans, guns and debt

Every day I hear one or more of the Republican candidates eschewing fiscal conservatism. “Our debt has gotten out of hand and we need to do something.” OK, I’m in. The problem is, it’s the Republicans who have made the greatest debt. Under the Reagan-Bush years our deficit doubled. Under George W. it went up another 50%. The only time we saw a reduction in the past 30 years was under Clinton. Not to give him too much credit – he was at the right place and the right time, the country was having a huge economic growth spurt in his early years, due mostly to high tech.

Our biggest expense is defense spending, currently at about $700 billion/year (that’s the official number anyway). Put in other terms, if you add the next 14 countries in a list of defense spending, the United States spends more than all of them (China, UK, France, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia, German, India, Italy, Brazil, South Korea, Australia, Canada, and Turkey) combined.

I live near Camp Pendleton and some days the windows rattle from 7 a.m. to midnight when the boys next door shoot of their big guns. I have to think that every volley is costing taxpayers more than $100,000.

We have military bases in 26 countries. No other country sees the globe as a board game. You can argue that we need all of our military might as the Republican do. Really? Isn’t the cold war over? Can’t the NATO countries defend themselves? And by the way why do we have such a strong presence in Europe? Are we still worried about an invasion from Russia? They rather spend their money on indoor plumbing. Our military is still developing weapons for fights against conventional armies when our enemies these days are anything but. Sure, we want to protect our interests (read: oil). We can do so with less.

So where do the Republican candidates stand on defense spending? Romney says he would increase it by 4%. Santorum would not reduce the current levels and Gingrich would increase it, though he hasn’t stated by how much. Only Ron Paul, who hasn’t got a snowball’s chance of getting the nomination, is for reducing the defense budget and cutting back our military presence around the globe. Of course, Obama has not made great strides in this area either. Most likely he won’t until after the election (assuming he wins) since he would be accused of being weak and leaving us vulnerable.

Reducing our defense spending would be kind of like trading in a Ferrari for a corvette. Still plenty fast enough.



2/13/12 all rights reserved