federal deficit
Rumor has it that the current deficit/debt discussions between the White House and the Republican House leadership may include $1 trillion in defense savings over the next ten years. If this were true, it would be both good news and a manageable savings, since it constitutes roughly 15% of the total resources DOD currently projects for defense over the next ten budgets.
But it is not true. Turns out to be a case of wasting the Congress' time with phoney cuts, abusing budget baselines, and a political fraud on the American people. The trillion dollars, it turns out, is all based on the assumption that we will spend significantly less on the wars or any other combat deployments than the more than $1 trillion we have already invested.
(originally posted on The Will and the Wallet
For thirty-five years, the Egyptian people believed the myth and lived in fear, fear of the security forces and fear of the chaos and instability that might exist without a strong ruler. They have just overcome that fear and created hope. That collective psychic shift was the key to making the change they needed to bring about.
I promised over the weekend that I had much more to say about Saturday's Washington Post editorial on the deficit that was...well...completely wrong.
Take a look.
Wars and Health Care Reform Should Both Be Paid For
Oct. 27, 2009
By Stan Collender
Roll Call Contributing Writer
The Washington Post ran a budget-related editorial on Saturday (“A critical question”) that attempted to explain why it insists that health care reform not increase the deficit even though it doesn’t believe that spending for activities in Iraq and Afghanistan have to be offset. The Post’s arguments weren’t just unconvincing, they also don’t make any sense.
Every other budget summit has been held when a deal had to be reached more or less immediately. In all of those cases, a summit was needed because there was some type of budget stalemate between Democrats and Republicans, the House and Senate, or Congress and the White House (or all of those) and there was a great deal of pressure on everyone in the room to come to some agreement. The stalemate, and therefore, the summit, usually occurred late in the budget process.
But none of these things are the case now and that means that the Obama budget summit being held at the White House on Monday is going to be very different than the ones we’ve had before. The differences:
• There is no need to reach a budget deal this year. Deficit reduction is not the appropriate fiscal policy in the current economic environment and few are seriously suggesting that the summit needs to produce an agreement. In other words, we don’t actually need the summit to do anything.
• This summit is happening at the start of the budget process rather than towards the end.
• There’s no stalemate that has to be resolved.
