America Wrongly Thinks Its Prosperity Can't End

When the think-tank chappies ponder "decline," they tend to see it in geopolitical terms.

Great powers gradually being shunted off the world stage have increasing difficulties getting their way: Itsy-bitsy colonial policing operations in dusty ramshackle outposts drag on for years and putter out to no obvious conclusion.

If that sounds vaguely familiar, well, the State Department reported that the last Christian church in Afghanistan was razed in 2010. This intriguing factoid came deep within their "International Religious Freedom Report."

It is not, in any meaningful sense of that word, "international." For the last decade, Afghanistan has been a U.S. client state; its repulsive and corrupt leader is kept alive only by NATO arms; according to the World Bank, the Western military/aid presence accounts for 97% of the country's economy.

American taxpayers have spent nearly half a trillion dollars and lost many brave warriors in that benighted land, and all we have to show for it is a regime openly contemptuous of the global sugar daddy that created and sustained it.

In another American client state, the Iraqi government is publicly supporting the murderous goon in Syria and supplying him with essential aid as he attempts to maintain his dictatorship. Your tax dollars at work.

As America sinks into a multitrillion-dollar debt pit, it is fascinating to listen to so many of my friends on the right fret about potential cuts to the Pentagon budget. The problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is not that we are spending insufficient money, but that so much of that money has been utterly wasted.

The military budgets are not breaking the bank.It is the entitlements.

You make the same mistake everyone else makes - looking for a single source which if fixed would restore America. Well, the military budget is also part of the American entitlement mentality. We are not a free market capitalist country with a popularly elected republican form of government. We are a kleptocracy with every transaction loaded with lard for freeloaders. It is both parties. RINOs are worse, actually, because they are more organized in ripping off the people. Think TARP, which was a RINO invention - Bush, McCain, Paulson, etc. The dims don't get off the hook either, Solyndra, Fannie and Freddie, etc., although good old fashioned RINOs were perfeectly happy tanking the country trading their paper.

We can all argue about the best way to accomplish some social good, but the problem is that enormous resources everywhere are being wasted accomplishing no good whatsoever. It is not just socialists. It is everyone. Iraq and Afghanistan were poorly conceived Republican ideas.

I don’t make that mistake, and I don’t believe I said that. This issue far pre-dates RINO’s so I view them as a red herring in this discussion of what the actual issue is.

I disagree with you in that I am not making the assumption that cutting EVERYTHING else but the military will fix the problem, i certainly didn’t say that.

What I take issue with is designating it as the FIRST and ONLY option on the chopping block.

In MY world, I would not touch a cent of military spending, no matter how wasteful it seems, UNTIL cuts have been made in OTHER programs.

I don’t disagree that RINO’s did or didn’t exist at some point, how long back it went, or whether defense contractors are or aren’t feeding at the public trough.

There are two issues I address:

1.) Defense spending, as part of the entire budget, is a far, far smaller problem than entitlement spending and liberal pet projects as a whole.

2.) I am not against cutting portions of defense spending. What I object to is when the time to cut arrives, liberal politicians of all stripes immediately go directly to defense spending. Bypass entitlements. Bypass liberal pet projects. Bypass Turkey Basters for Lesbians. Bypass fast rail pork projects from nowhere to nowhere, and which will ever after require union employees and government subsidies. Bypass ACORN, PBS, NPR, NEA, bike paths, whatever spending and go DIRECTLY to defense spending.

THAT is what I have an issue with. Even with wasteful defense spending, there is SOMETHING that comes out of it, even if we DID pay more than we should have. With all this other crap supported and advanced by liberals, those are a ar, FAR larger part of the pie, and those projects and budgets are black holes that money goes down, in many cases, appearing again in the pockets of liberal unions and projects that leverage unions.

For example, when Obama took over, he increased the size of the Civil Rights part of the DOJ by a few hundred million dollars. More far left lawyers were hired to promote his leftist (and THEIR leftist) agenda. Sure, 150-300 million dollars is small change now, but if stuff is being put on the chopping block, why aren’t 200 newly hired leftist lawyers and all the infrastucture put in place to support them being put on the chopping block as well?

That is my issue. Not that we need to make cuts, we do. It is that simply because the Left views defense spending as money down a black hole that shouldn’t even exist, put to no good and poor use (that they would rather put towards their pet projects, whatever the heck they are) and always want to cut that first.

Worse, like Charlie Brown having the football pulled out, they say “okay, let’s get cuts across the board” then somehow...those OTHER cuts never happen, or are so obscured in smoke and mirrors that the budgets actually INCREASE for them, and nobody is the wiser, except for the deficit which rises further and further, now with the NEW leftist projects embedded in it which are off-limits to any budget cutters. Not only that, they take those new and larger budgets, and increase THOSE by 10-20% each year, because THOSE are now the new ‘baseline’.

THAT is what I object to.

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