On July 1, Leon Panetta was promoted by President Barack Obama. He left his job as Director of the C.I.A to become the 23rd United States Secretary of Defense.
On August 4, he said to reporters, “We're already taking our share of the discretionary cuts as part of this debt-ceiling agreement, and those are going to be tough enough. I think anything beyond that would damage our national defense.” He proposed we raise taxes and cut entitlement programs—Medicare and Social Security.
In a speech from the White House August 8, Barack Obama agreed with Panetta.
“Our challenge is the need to tackle our deficits over the long term," Obama said. Last week we reached an historic agreement that will make historic cuts to defense and domestic spending. But there's not much further that we can cut in either of those categories. What we need to do now is combine those spending cuts with two additional steps: tax reform that will ask those who can afford it to pay their fair share and modest adjustments to health care programs like Medicare.”
This series of events is a problem and let me explain to you why.
First, we spend a lot of money of defense:
I find this graph, from The Economist, troubling. I’m not an expert in military spending, but it doesn’t seem like we should be spending more than all of those countries combined, not to mention that we spend more than 2 percent of our GDP on defense than most other comparable modern countries in Europe.
How did we get to this point? Well, after 9/11 and during Bush's presidency, defense spending skyrocketed. We entered two wars and created an arbitrary color system to scare the American people into supporting the Bush agenda. Defense spending was always going to rise after 9/11, but here is a good graph from The New York Times showing how much Bush’s defense spending has contributed to our deficit compared to other policy changes.
Bush used 9/11 to unnecessarily invade Iraq and raise defense spending to ridiculous levels. That being said, Bush does not deserve all the blame.
As that graph shows, Obama has slightly cut defense spending, and that graph does not factor in the small defense cuts of the recent debt-ceiling deal, but Obama has not done nearly enough.
The war in Afghanistan is still going strong, Guantanamo Bay is still operating, we have unnecessarily intervened in the revolutions of the Arab Spring and our defense spending is still far too high. One of Obama’s campaign slogans was “Change,” but there has not been nearly enough change regarding America’s defense budget.
This brings me back to Leon Panetta. Panetta said that cutting defense spending any further, “would damage our national defense.” It’s as if he was trying to give political ammunition to Republicans, who consider defense as somewhat of a sacred cow, so that Democrats wouldn’t even try to cut defense. We have to cut defense spending to reduce our deficit, but it is impossible to do that when we have a Defense Secretary saying things like that. If Democrats got serious about cutting defense at any point in the near future, Republicans would peddle a quote like that until every single American heard it. Americans do not what to “damage our national defense” at any cost.
And that brings me to my final point. Panetta, instead of cutting defense, wants taxes to be raised and entitlement programs to be cut. Let’s be honest with ourselves, despite the fact that taxes are the lowest they’ve been in decades, taxes are going to stay just about where they are. Obama might be able to fix some inefficiencies and loopholes in the tax code, but for the most part, no Republican is going to vote to raise taxes, and we can in large part thank Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Pledge” for that.
So if it’s a not tax hikes, that leaves entitlement programs, such as Medicare and Social Security. Instead of cutting our defense budget, we are going to cut basic social programs that visibly help millions of Americans every day.
The origin of our huge defense budget can be traced back to when a small group of Muslim extremists orchestrated a tremendous attack on American soil on 9/11. These terrorists wanted to do nothing else than to kill Americans and to disrupt the American lifestyle. More than ever, they are now disrupting the American lifestyle. Right now, we are cutting basic welfare and entitlement programs to sustain our enormous defense budget.
It has long been argued that if we back out of our wars in the Middle East, the terrorists might win. But if we cut necessary programs to fund an unnecessary defense budget, then the terrorists will surely win.
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