A Sensible Solution to the Sequester Problem

[Crackpot]

The sequester was designed to be such a bad idea that only a bunch of idiots would let it take effect.

An unfortunnate way to remove all doubt.

[Rick]

Found an article seems to be more money than I thought:

The Military Industrial Complex Is Too Strong Is Too Many States

“Preventing future acts of international terrorism” is the most critical foreign-policy goal for Americans, according to Gallup. Next priorities: proliferation of nuclear weapons, energy supply, favorable trade policies, etc.

Fighting off Soviet tanks rumbling towards Frankfurt didn’t make the list. Yet Congress, in its infinite wisdom, is still pushing weapon systems designed to do just that, whether the Pentagon wants them or not.

Based on this laudable principle, the US plowed $689 billion into defense in 2011, more than the next 16 biggest military spenders combined, and 40% of total worldwide military spending. Number two China spent $129 billion, number three Russia a measly $64 billion.

Defense industry lobbying in the US greased the wheels with $129 million last year—for what must be enormous returns on investment.

Hence the deafening squealing about the looming automatic spending cuts on the defense side. They would account for about half of the $1.2 trillion in cuts spread over a decade. The first $46 billion would get snipped this year. Brutal? The Congressional Budget Office estimated that defense spending would still grow by 2.4% annually over the decade. It would just grow less rapidly.

Congress doesn’t see it that way. “We’ve gone past cutting the meat—we’re into the bone,” griped House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, a California Republican. Congress loves defense spending. It’s just too juicy. And they can wrap it—the money—in patriotism. To illustrate, Bloomberg took a gander at two of our heroes.

There’s Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, an “anti-war Democratic senator from Washington State” who “voted against the Iraq war resolution and subsequent troop surges.” She’s spearheading the Senate’s efforts to bring the budget in line. Until it gets to Boeing.

Now $51 billion are on the table to replace the old aerial tankers with the KC-46, a modified version of the Boeing 767 passenger jet. It will be built in her state and may eventually create 11,000 jobs. The first $4.9 billion were already awarded. Of the 20 years she has been in the Senate, she spent 10 years shepherding the program through a tangle of issues and investigations.

“Champion for the Boeing Co.,” is how Boeing spokesman Doug Kennett endorsed her during her reelection campaign in 2010.

What motivated her? Not national security. Not the fight against terrorism. But the economy in her state, the money that came with it, and her reelection. She admitted it when she said, “Many defense programs, particularly in the aerospace industry, have a tremendous impact on our entire nation’s industrial base.”

That “industrial base” is composed of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and thousands of smaller companies that all feed on the huge corporate welfare trough filled by taxpayers who will have to deal with the resulting mountain of debt—and tax increases.

Then there’s Jim Jordan, an “anti-tax Republican representative from Ohio.” His favorite toy is the M1 Abrams tank, which entered service in 1980 to battle Soviet tanks in Europe. The Army and Marine Corps have about 6,000 of them. The Army wants to shut down production at the plant in Lima, Ohio, where old tanks are rebuilt and updated. Later, it would reopen it to build a redesigned tank. It would save over $2 billion, but 600 workers would lose their jobs.

“The conundrum we have is that we don’t need the tanks,” explained Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno to the House Appropriations Committee last year.

But whether the Army needed them or not didn’t matter to Jordan. General Dynamics operated the plant, made money off it, and contributed to his campaign. So he fought successfully to keep it open. Jordan is a “budget hawk,” said a Republican voter in Lima, “until they want to cut something in his district.”

In addition to procurement, there are other issues spiraling out of control, including the military health-care system and staffing. While the Pentagon is cutting combat forces—trimming the Army by 72,000 over the next four years—the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has ballooned from 1,313 in 2010 to 4,244 in 2012.

“Not every defense dollar is sacrosanct,” said former Defense Secretary Robert Gates. “One need only spend 10 minutes walking around the Pentagon or any major military headquarters to see excess and redundancy.”

But it is sacrosanct in Washington. Defense spending is spread across all states, and the industry is so tightly woven into the fabric of Congress, and the amounts are so huge and campaign donations so important that cutting anything at all, even “waste”—another constituent’s income—or even something the Pentagon doesn’t want, may prove too much for our heroes in Congress.

But Americans aren’t blind; Congressional job approval ratings have been in the dumpster for years, hitting new lows of 10% twice in 2012, and hovering at 15% currently. Republicans practically despise Congress, with a mere 6% approving of it in January, a new low, though it has since edged up a bit.

Corporate insiders rotate in and out of various government agencies—nut just at the Department of Defense. An egregious example is the SEC, where Wall Street culture and personalities have come to dominate. Regulation and enforcement have become a joke. A principle so common that it has a name: “Regulatory Capture.” Read.... Wall Street Takes Over Its Regulator.

[Lord Jim]

Some reporting from Bob Woodward on how we got here:

Obama’s sequester deal-changer
By Bob Woodward,February 22, 2013

Misunderstanding, misstatements and all the classic contortions of partisan message management surround the sequester, the term for the $85 billion in ugly and largely irrational federal spending cuts set by law to begin Friday.

What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”

A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.

At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew’s nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) asked Lew about the account in my book: “Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Lew responded, “and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States.”

“Did you make the suggestion?” Burr asked.

“Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”

In other words, yes.

But then Burr asked about the president’s statement during the presidential debate, that the Republicans originated it.

Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, then shifted to denial mode: “Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something that the administration was pushing at that moment.”

That statement was not accurate.

On Tuesday, Obama appeared at the White House with a group of police officers and firefighters to denounce the sequester as a “meat-cleaver approach” that would jeopardize military readiness and investments in education, energy and readiness. He also said it would cost jobs. But, the president said, the substitute would have to include new revenue through tax reform.

At noon that same day, White House press secretary Jay Carney shifted position and accepted sequester paternity.

“The sequester was something that was discussed,” Carney said. Walking back the earlier statements, he added carefully, “and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”

This was an acknowledgment that the president and Lew had been wrong.

Why does this matter?

First, months of White House dissembling further eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans. (The Republicans are by no means blameless and have had their own episodes of denial and bald-faced message management.)

Second, Lew testified during his confirmation hearing that the Republicans would not go along with new revenue in the portion of the deficit-reduction plan that became the sequester. Reinforcing Lew’s point, a senior White House official said Friday, “The sequester was an option we were forced to take because the Republicans would not do tax increases.”

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013 ... rob-nabors

[Rick]

Go figger...poiltics...

[Rick]

The case for the sequester’s defense cuts

After the Korean War, the base defense budget fell by 43 percent. After the Vietnam War, it fell by 33 percent. After the Soviet Union toppled and the Cold War ended, it fell by 36 percent.

That’s the pattern of military spending in America. It rockets in times of war but falls back down in times of peace.

Over the past decade, we’ve been at war. And our spending went way up. In 2001, under President George W. Bush, the military budget was $287 billion. In 2012, after accounting for the military budget and the war spending, it was about $700 billion. That’s a bigger increase in spending than we saw for either the Vietnam War or the Cold War.



And here’s where it left us: $700 billion is more than China, the U.K., France, Japan, India, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Australia and Canada spend on their militaries combined.

Our wars are ending. Officially, the war in Iraq is over. The war in Afghanistan is drawing down. Osama bin Laden is dead. Typically, at this moment, spending drops by somewhere between 33 percent and 43 percent.



If the sequester goes into effect, the full cut to the defense budget will be about 31 percent. Think about that — during the war on terror, the defense budget increased by more than it did during the Cold War or the Vietnam War, and even with the sequester, the cut to the defense budget will be less than it was after either of those.

Kind of puts the doomsaying in perspective, huh?

Now, sequestration is a really stupid way to cut the defense budget. I’m not arguing that. But a $500 billion cut is not necessarily a stupid amount by which to cut the defense budget. And cutting $500 billion from the defense budget is not necessarily a stupid way to reduce the deficit.

Compare it, for instance, with the other options. When the Democrats talk about tax reform, when they say they want to replace the sequester and almost all of the defense cuts with tax revenue, what they’re saying is they want to limit what are called itemized deductions for the rich.

That doesn’t mean much to most people. But when you hear that, here’s what you should hear: Democrats want to limit subsidies for rich people to donate to charity, pay their state and local taxes and buy big houses. That’s what those itemized deductions are really about: They’re overwhelmingly made up of the charitable deduction, the home mortgage interest deduction and the state and local tax deduction, and we’re talking about cutting them for rich people.

When Republicans talk about their sequester replacement, they’re talking about policies — they’ve proposed a couple of them — that move the cuts over toward domestic spending. Food stamps and Medicaid are prominent targets in their bills, as are policies that simply tighten the caps on domestic discretionary spending — which would mean bigger cuts to education, infrastructure and other priorities.

The sequester is bad economic policy, and for that reason, I’d like to get rid of it altogether. If we do keep it, we absolutely have to give agencies the ability to make decisions about how to make those cuts — something Congress is discussing. But if you gave me a choice between getting $500 billion by cutting defense spending, or by cutting spending on houses and charities and state and local taxes, or by cutting spending on social services, I’d take the defense cuts.

Moreover, there are unsettling implications to the argument that even though the wars are ending, America needs to break with historical precedent and keep its defense budget high. That’s an acceptance of the idea that we’re now in a permanent state of semi-war, with all that that entails. In the long run, I think that’s a dangerous mindset. Bringing down the defense budget is one of the few ways to decisively reject that reimagining of America’s posture toward the rest of the world.

It's even got charts...

[oldr_n_wsr]

I had to check and see if rubato posted that as I didn't see his signature at the bottom.

[Econoline]

Good article, keld.

Moreover, there are unsettling implications to the argument that even though the wars are ending, America needs to break with historical precedent and keep its defense budget high. That’s an acceptance of the idea that we’re now in a permanent state of semi-war, with all that that entails. In the long run, I think that’s a dangerous mindset.

But...but...Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!

Also, War Is Peace.

[Jarlaxle]

It should be pointed out that the 2% number regarding the cuts is really misleading...

That refers to the budget overall, but since the sequester doesn't touch entitlement spending at all, (or interest payments on the debt, which obviously can't be cut) the actual cuts work out to 9% in discretionary domestic spending and 13% in defense.

It's a start. Now fire up the chainsaws & keep cutting!

[liberty]

I believe that the cost of the military could be reduced by almost half by bring back the draft. We will always need a professional military which will have to be paid more than draftees, but there are may duties that draftees can perform.

[liberty]

Why not stop all foreign aids that would be about thirty four billion dollars to use for our own people?

[Guinevere]

I believe that the cost of the military could be reduced by almost half by bring back the draft. We will always need a professional military which will have to be paid more than draftees, but there are may duties that draftees can perform.

Let's bring back slavery, too.

[Scooter]

Don't give him any ideas.

The village idiot would know, if he had the language skills to read a newspaper, that other countries have eliminated the draft precisely because it was costing too much, choosing instead to run their militaries on an all-volunteer basis.

[liberty]

I believe that the cost of the military could be reduced by almost half by bring back the draft. We will always need a professional military which will have to be paid more than draftees, but there are may duties that draftees can perform.

Let's bring back slavery, too.

As I see it a draft is merely a tax that one pays with service instead of money. And my proposal would be slightly different than the previous drafts. During the War Between the States in the north a wealthy man could avoid the draft by paying someone to take his place. I consider that unfair, but I don’t see anything unfair about taxation.

In my proposal there would be a tax considerations. An individual that submitted to the draft would receive a tax credit and person that rejected the draft would have tax debit. In other words a person who served through the draft would pay less tax for the rest of his life until the end of his military eligibility than a person that was not drafted. An individual who refused the draft would pay more tax for the same period of time. The exact amount of money would have to be word out, but I was thinking perhaps five percent less tax for the person that served and ten percent more tax for the individual who refused to serve. Military eligibility would end at sixty five years of age.

This could possibly end up in a spoiled self-centered society making money for the government.

[Scooter]

Talk about "rich man's war, poor man's fight"...

[Jarlaxle]

I believe that the cost of the military could be reduced by almost half by bring back the draft. We will always need a professional military which will have to be paid more than draftees, but there are may duties that draftees can perform.

In addition to being flat-out evil, that would cost MORE money.

[liberty]

I believe that the cost of the military could be reduced by almost half by bring back the draft. We will always need a professional military which will have to be paid more than draftees, but there are may duties that draftees can perform.

In addition to being flat-out evil, that would cost MORE money.

I feel that you are a serious poster so I will ask you the question: What is evil about it and why? Is the draft evil? Is it evil to tax people. Is it evil for the government give rewards for things it want to encourage and penalties for things it wants to discourage.

[Econoline]

I can't answer for Jarl, but In my own opinion the draft is evil because it constitutes involuntary servitude, pure and simple.

[Jarlaxle]

Slavery is evil. Sugarcoat it however you want, a draft is SLAVERY.

[oldr_n_wsr]

My son had to register for the draft in order to get any kind of aid for college. Not so for my daughter. I don't understand what registering for the draft has to do with any kind of possible financial aid for college. (he got no aid).

[liberty]

Slavery is evil. Sugarcoat it however you want, a draft is SLAVERY.

Using the same logic wouldn’t taxation also be evil. Your money represents labor, it is your labor in the form of a medium of exchange. If a mugger takes your money he has in effect make you slave for period of time equal to the amount of time it would take you to replace the money.