Federal Deficit

As Greg Sargent notes:

There’s an interesting thing to be noted about polling on the deficit, by the way. When people are asked about the deficit in isolation, they signal real concern. But when they are asked about the deficit in the context of other priorities, attitudes shift.

Huh! It’s almost as if people worry more about what tangibly affects their lives than they do about what keeps Larry Kudlow up at night.

We are, of course, currently drawing down from one of the multiple wars we’re fighting, making it harder to justify maintaining such a large Army, but the Army is basically convinced that the world is heading for a disastrous post-apocalyptic hellscape scenario:

The gist is that the global economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Playing armchair economist — gleaned from airport economic tomes like Aftershock, a book about how to “Profit in the Next Global Financial Meltdown” — Army panelists predicted that recovery won’t take root until 2020. That will lead the U.S. to pull back from its global security burdens, leading resource-starved nations to “go take the oil” in the resulting leadership vacuum, opined Robert Toguchi from the Army Capabilities Integration Center, which sponsored the futurism seminar.

Meanwhile, ecological disasters and a weak economy will change world migratory patterns to favor “mega-cities” of more than 10 million people. Guess what that means. “The battle terrain [will become] increasingly urban and complex,” Toguchi continued. “We had the experience of Fallujah and Sadr City, but it’s going to be a lot harder.”

The global economy will remain a horrific disaster for another decade and we’re facing worldwide environmental catastrophe, so we must never, ever cut funding for the Army. Got it.

The Army shouldn’t even worry itself with justifying its funding. As with anything involving dollar amounts in the billions, there’s a side industry devoted to maintaining these government income streams for the corporations that profit from our addiction to defense spending. The aerospace and defense lobbies spend a fortune arguing that America must always spend 10 times whatever any other nation spends on future weapons and missile defense systems that don’t work and things like that.

These industries have powerful allies, too. (I mean besides almost every single member of Congress.) Here’s the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, the conservative business columnist who regularly inveighs against wasteful government spending:

People who see military cuts as an easy way to reduce budget deficits forget that this has already occurred. From the late 1980s to 2010, the number of America’s armed forces dropped from 2.1 million men and women to about 1.4 million. The downsizing — the “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War — was not undone by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1990, the Army had 172 combat battalions, the Navy 546 ships and the Air Force 4,355 fighters; today, those numbers are 100 battalions, 288 ships and 1,990 fighters.

This is a distortion so naked and unconvincing that I’m surprised an editor didn’t cut it to save Samuelson some embarrassment. He’s comparing numbers for everything besides … the money we actually spend on defense, which is ostensbily the topic of the column. (And when inflation-adjusted defense spending actually held steady, instead of rising, during the 1990s … the deficit improved. So it seems like maybe it is an easy way to reduce budget deficits?)

Here’s Samuelson two weeks ago, demanding that Presidents Bush and Clinton tour the nation apologizing for “not tackling Social Security and Medicare when they had the chance.” (Social Security, by the way, is running a surplus and will continue to run a surplus minus any intervention for years.) But this is to be expected: Samuelson cares about maintaining a low-tax/huge-military state, not about something abstract like “the deficit.” He demands that the U.S. spend less on healthcare for seniors and poor people so that we can continue to afford preparedness for hypothetical air wars with China.

There’s no cut, no matter how sensible-sounding, that the defense-worshippers will agree to. The Weekly Standard says America must maintain its Cold War-era nuclear weapons system “triad” of intercontinental ballistic missiles, ballistic missile submarines, and heavy bombers, because … well, some unnamed future enemy might figure out how to shoot down cruise missiles and track submarines, and then we wouldn’t be able to nuke them to death after they nuke us.

But in Congress, as Matt Yglesias recently noted, the primary argument against defense cuts is, of course, jobs. Because the American people would like jobs!

It’s true that defense spending leads to side benefits for consumers and other industries, but direct investment in research in those other sectors would be just as helpful. Defense spending “creates” jobs, too. As Paul Krugman says, that’s because government spending creates jobs, making every Republican who uses that argument a secret Keynesian.

All I’m saying is, it’d be nice for most of us to see some of the billions we spend blowing other people up spent maybe on educating, feeding and employing people, instead. But a lot of people have a very strong financial and ideological commitment to argue otherwise, and they usually win.

Jim VandeHei and famous email newsletter author Mike Allen are spearheading the campaign (which has already been unfavorably reviewed by CJR). Here, they explain why America was crying out for Politico Primary:

The public has had it with Washington and conventional politics. It has lost trust and respect in the conventional governing class. There is mounting evidence voters don’t see President Barack Obama or the current crop of GOP candidates as the clear and easy solution. As Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg argues, it seems likely if not inevitable an atmosphere this toxic and destabilized will produce an independent presidential candidate who could shake the political system.

If so, who? Is there a person in politics, business or entertainment who could harness the public’s hunger for something new, different and inspiring? We are putting this question to readers on POLITICO, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter as well as viewers of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to solicit ideas and ultimately vote on them. This is part parlor game, part reporting assignment — and hinges entirely on voters and readers engaging in the debate. So have at it.

America is sick of “Washington and conventional politics,” and so Politico has chosen the following unconventional non-Washington candidates to shake things up:

• Deficit hawk Erskine Bowles, a conservative Southern Democrat who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff.
• John Chambers, a CEO.
• Hillary Clinton, the current secretary of state, a former senator, the woman who was almost the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, and a Washington insider by any definition since her tenure as first lady of the United States in the 1990s.
• Gen. David Petraeus, a general.
• Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state who worked in both Bush administrations and was involved in the campaign of misinformation that led to the war in Iraq.

Doesn’t that scream “new, different and inspiring”? Each candidate also gets a hilarious blurb from VandeHei and Allen. Here’s the intro to Bowles’:

The most depressing reality of modern governance is this: The current system seems incapable of dealing with our debt addiction before it becomes a crippling crisis.

That is indeed the most depressing reality of modern governance, as long as every single other one of America’s festering unsolvable problems is a pure abstraction to you, because you’re rich and gainfully employed.

Then Politico’s readers made their picks! They nominated billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg, current incredibly unpopular Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, perennial fantasy candidate Gen. Colin Powell, former OMB head and No Labels favorite David M. Walker, and consummate insider center-left Democrat Sen. Mark Warner. What a great lineup!

Columbia Journalism Review’s Greg Marx raves:

Indifference to policy, an eagerness to see politicians as products to be marketed, undue deference to institutional authority, a fetish for “centrism,” regurgitated conventional wisdom, a breathtaking failure of imagination—it’s all here.

That about sums it up. Vote billionaire businessman deficit hawk moderate general for president in 2012!

Think Progress links to the words of NOAA administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco:

Speaking at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science on a day when the weather forecast warned of possible tornadoes and golf-ball-size hail east of the city, Dr. Lubchenco said there would be a gap of at least a year and a half, and possibly much longer, during which NOAA has no operational satellite circling the planet on a north-south orbit.

The polar-orbiting satellite enables scientists to predict severe storms five to 10 days before they hit.

“Whether the gap is longer than that depends on whether we get the money”— $1 billion — “in the next budget,” warned Dr. Lubchenco, an environmental scientist. “I would argue that these satellites are critically important to saving lives and property and to enabling homeland security.”

This is an old story: Before or after a natural disaster, you can usually find a Republican who wanted to cut funding for departments and organizations that predicted and protected people from said disaster.

Remember when Louisiana governor and poor public speaker mocked the concept of funding for “volcano monitoring” and then a volcano promptly erupted in Alaska? And remember how after Eric Cantor pushed for across-the-board budget cuts for the United States Geological Survey, his district was hit with an earthquake? And remember how the House Republican budget cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and then there was an earthquake and tsunami in Japan?

Yes, well, as Matt Yglesias points out, when you want to cut funding for everything the government does, sometimes there will be major news events that involve something the government should be doing something about, and people will say, hey, shouldn’t the government be doing something about this?

Cutting money for disaster preparedness programs is a really good method of eventually wasting much more money, in the future, than you saved in the present, but that’s sort of been the entire Republican spending philosophy for years now, actually.