NICK GILLESPIE: Get Ready for Stories About How Cutting $1.2 Trillion in Future Spending is Responsible for Today’s Government Failures.
Now that the White House has released its massive sequestration report detailing the $1.2 trillion in possible cuts to future spending over the next 10 years, expect to read more headlines like the following from Buzzfeed:
Mandatory Defense Cuts Would Slash Funding To Security At Embassies, Report Says
You got that implication, kemo sabe?Possible future trims in spending have something to do with what’s going in the Middle East right now. Not that embassies are under attack now because of American foreign policy or world events or rotten security or whatever. Or that we can’t defend our citizens and diplomatic corps right now despite record-high levels of spending on defense and military operations for most of the 21st century.
No, the real bad news is coming if and when the United States stops its 12-year long spending spree that has all but killed any chance of recovery and piled on the debt like Dagwood Bumstead loading cold cuts onto a sandwich roll.
I would make fun of Buzzfeed, but it’s not like the others are really any better or more honest. Meanwhile, if we had had competent management we could have secured our embassies pretty easily. And that’s without even adopting my flamethrower-based embassy-defense strategy.
Plus Nick’s bottom line: “In fact, the cuts for 2013 amount to maybe a whopping $120 billion in an annual budget that is likely to run about $3.8 trillion. Out of the $120 billion, about $50 billion will come out of military budget that will be well north of $650 billion, including war funding. Let’s leave aside the mad rush by every part of the government to link its current failures to a future spending cut and instead point out the obvious: Sequestration in no way threatens any basic governmental function. Period.”
The first thing we should be sequestering are Congressional salaries. If we did that, we wouldn’t have to worry about any of the rest . . . .