In May, Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson tackled the objectives of the Commission, and its members, noting that only one expert on defense spending sits on the Commission, who is a CEO of a major war corporation. Altman and Kingson:
President Obama and the leadership in Congress have delegated enormous, unaccountable authority to 18 unrepresentative, inordinately wealthy individuals. The 18 individuals are meeting regularly, in secret, behind closed doors, until safely beyond this year’s mid-term election. If they reach agreement, their proposal will be voted on in December by a lame duck Congress, without the benefit of open hearings and deliberations in the pertinent committees and without the opportunity for open debate and amendment on the floors of the House and Senate. Despite the speed and lack of accountability, the legislation will affect, in substantial ways, every man, woman, and child in this nation.
Who are these powerful people and what are their views?
They are the members of President Obama’s newly-formed National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. They lack racial and gender diversity, and more importantly, they lack diversity of opinion. Their mantra is that “everything is on the table,” but their one member who has any expertise with respect to defense spending, for instance, is the CEO of a major defense contractor that devotes millions of dollars each year to lobby Congress for more defense spending.
“Everything is on the table,” they say, but the members appointed by the minority leaders in the House and Senate have made clear that they do not believe that the problems in this country stem from under-taxing, rather from overspending. The one area that they seem to be in agreement on -- and which they are in fact, focusing on like a laser -- involves programs that help the middle class and those Americans who are the most vulnerable. Even liberal Senator Richard Durbin has stated, “the bleeding-heart liberals… have to…make real sacrifices to strengthen our nation.”
Another fiscal-oriented Commission sprang up in Washington earlier this year to counter the President's Commission that is dead-set against cuts to the military budget. The Commission is bipartisan, and includes elected representatvies and policy analysts that are heavily critical of military overspending. It is called "The Sustainable Defense Task Force" and it is headed by Congressman Barney Frank. They released a report in June, informing the President that one trillion dollars can be cut from the military budget over the next ten years without compromising America's national security.
But the President hasn't listened. As Dan Froomkin reported in the Huffington Post, Obama's Commission is zealously moving towards cuts to Social Security, and other social programs. Froomkin:
Despite some lip service from the deficit commission, there is no serious indication that the requisite 14 of the group's 18 members will agree on anything that would involve defense cuts.
Even President Obama's proposed freeze on discretionary spending explicitly rules out any defense cuts.
By contrast, the deficit commission seems to be drawing a bead on the social safety net in general, and Social Security in particular.
Congressman Ron Paul is also part of the Commission. He made military spending one of his core issues in his 2008 presidential campaign, and much of his support stemmed from the fact that he's consistent on government cuts. Throughout the last three years Paul has frequently stated that it is wiser to cut unnecessary parts of the defense budget, and end the wars, than to slash Social Security, which millions of Americans depend on. In a CNN interview in July Paul said that America is spending "$1 trillion a year," on foreign policy alone. PolitiFact.com checked out if his estimation was factual, and they concluded that it was, saying:
Ron Paul claims that the U.S. spends $1 trillion a year on foreign policy. Our experts acknowledged that the figure largely depends on one's definition of "foreign policy." Changing the definition means altering the expenses that one includes in the calculation. There was disagreement, for example, on whether to include the interest payments on debt-financed military spending and how to calculate that debt.
Still, give or take, most of the numbers that the experts threw at us come relatively close to, or even exceed, the $1 trillion mark. We find that Paul's underlying point is valid, and rate this one True.
Paul said that his one trillion number came from a report that was done by economist Robert Higgs. In March 2007 Higgs published an article called, "The Trillion-Dollar Defense Budget Is Already Here," writing:
To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I gathered data for fiscal 2006, the most recently completed fiscal year, for which data on actual outlays are now available. In that year, the Department of Defense itself spent $499.4 billion. Defense-related parts of the Department of Energy budget added $16.6 billion. The Department of Homeland Security spent $69.1 billion. The Department of State and international assistance programs laid out $25.3 billion for activities arguably related to defense purposes either directly or indirectly. The Department of Veterans Affairs had outlays of $69.8 billion. The Department of the Treasury, which funds the lion’s share of military retirement costs through its support of the little-known Military Retirement Fund, added $38.5 billion. A large part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s outlays ought to be regarded as defense-related, if only indirectly so. When all of these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the Pentagon itself, they increase the fiscal 2006 total by nearly half again, to $728.2 billion.Winslow Wheeler, one of the members on the SDTF, commented in a recent interview with AntiWar.com's Scott Horton that the trillion dollar budget is spread out throughout the government, including the Treasury, and includes the many billions that are awarded to defense contractors, and dished out to the department of Homeland Security. Horton raised the question that comes to everyone's minds when hearing the number one trillion, just how big is it? To get at least an idea of what one trillion dollars looks like, and what it can accompolish if it was used for constructive programs instead of war, see this, and this.
To find out how much of the government’s net interest payments on publicly held national debt ought to be attributed to past debt-funded defense spending requires a considerable amount of calculation. I added up all past deficits (minus surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to each year’s ratio of narrowly defined national security spending—military, veterans, and international affairs—to total federal spending, expressing everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 91.2 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public at the end of 2006. Therefore, I attribute that same percentage of the government’s net interest outlays in that year to past debt-financed defense spending. The total amount so attributed comes to $206.7 billion.
Adding this interest component to the previous all-agency total, the grand total comes to $934.9 billion, which is more than 87 percent greater than the Pentagon’s outlays alone.
Joshua Green, a senior editor of The Atlantic and a weekly political columnist for the Boston Globe, wrote in an article called "Cut the Military Budget" that Obama could gain politically by standing beside The Sustainable Defense Task Force:
The Sustainable Defense Task Force is lobbying the commission to do what Obama wouldn't: consider military cuts, and in the context of the entire federal budget. Members like Frank and Paul say they'll vote against any package that doesn't, and encourage congressional colleagues to do likewise.
Obama speaks often about overcoming old ways of thinking, but he chooses his fights carefully. He's ducked this one for now. But it's hard to see why he'd maintain the Democrats' defensive crouch, especially when military spending cuts would achieve two things he holds dear. First, it would demonstrate that he's serious about deficit cutting, which might free him and his party from their political stricture. Second, it would give him an opportunity to cooperate with Republicans, and not just moderates, but true deficit hawks like Paul. Targeting wasteful military spending -- like, say, those subsidies to the French -- might even channel Tea Party anger over government spending toward a productive purpose.
What's keeping Obama from seeing the light on war spending is the plutocracy that put him into power. He is beholden to interests that get rich off of war, and the last thing they want to see the President do is cut the senseless Pentagon budget. They would rather watch millions of Americans homeless, and penniless than cut one hundred billion dollars from the trillion dollar war racket. As long as Obama remains President, or any Republican or Democrat, then America's plutocracy will be free to cement their control of the nation's wealth, and pursue even more costly wars that achieve nothing but bankrupt the country, and make the world a more dangerous place.
