Glenn Greenwald took a chunk out of Evan Bayh’s hide, characterizing him as “the face of rotted Washington.” The specific trigger for this column was Bayh’s pretense of being a “deficit hawk” while supporting foreign military adventures but opposing taxes to pay for them.
Escalation of force in Afghanistan to the tune of 30,000 soldiers will cost an additional $30 billion per year. But, according to Sen. Bayh, there should be no taxes to pay for this because it’s “national defense.” Instead, Sen. Bayh wants to cut spending “in other parts of the budget.”
Quoth Glenzilla:
Bayh wants to send other people into every proposed war he can find and keep them there forever ever without ever bearing any of the costs himself — not in military service for him or his family nor even in higher taxes to pay for his glorious wars. Sacrifice is for everyone other than Evan Bayh and his friends. He runs around praising himself as a “deficit hawk” while recklessly supporting wars and indefinite occupations that the country can’t afford and which drive us further into debt. He feigns concern over the “deficit” only when it comes time to deny ordinary Americans benefits which he and his family already possess in abundance.
He then bashes Sen. Bayh about a little bit for his nepotism-fueled rise to political ascendancy and his wife’s cozy relationship with the insurance and health care industries.
I share Greenwald’s concern about why, somehow, military spending never seems to count to those who claim to be “fiscal conservatives.” For 2009, we’re spending on the order of $1 trillion on “defense.” (I put “defense” in quotes because some activities, such as the War in Iraq, may advance certain policies, but strike me as having precious little to do with “defending” the United States.) I’m not a knee-jerk peacenik, but I don’t see where we are getting all that much return on our tax dollars in this area. If we’re unsafe in the world, it’s certainly not for lack of spending. Our military budget is almost as much as the rest of the world’s combined. About 24% of our tax revenues can be attributed to defense spending.
The numbers are just so huge, that I don’t find it credible to try to advance one’s self as a “deficit hawk” while turning a blind eye to defense spending. Such lawmakers are apparently willing to send billion after billion in pursuit of some marginal, yet unmeasurable, increase in security before spending even lesser amounts domestically regardless of whether the expenditures will actually do some measurable good.
Update I hadn’t seen this opinion column by Nicholas Kristof published earlier this month.
President Obama and Congress will soon make defining choices about health care and troops for Afghanistan.
These two choices have something in common — each has a bill of around $100 billion per year. So one question is whether we’re better off spending that money blowing up things in Helmand Province or building up things in America.
. . .
Granted, the health care costs will continue indefinitely, while the United States cannot sustain 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for many years. On the other hand, the health care legislation pays for itself, according to the Congressional Budget Office, while the deployment in Afghanistan is unfinanced and will raise our budget deficits and undermine our long-term economic security.So doesn’t it seem odd to hear hawks say that health reform is fiscally irresponsible, while in the next breath they cheer a larger deployment of troops in Afghanistan?
Update 2 It seems Sen. Bayh’s commitment to deficit reduction is not so ardent when the issue is greater tax benefits for charitable giving by the very rich.
Update 3 Great quote from Steven Walt that I thought applied to this post:
Americans have come to believe that spending government revenues on U.S. citizens here at home is usually a bad thing and should be viewed wth suspicion, but spending billions on vast social engineering projects overseas is the hallmark of patriotism and should never be questioned. This position makes no sense, but it is hard to think of a prominent U.S. leader who is making an explicit case for doing somewhat less abroad so that we can afford to build a better future here at home.
Bayh’s selective deficit disorder was never on display more than this past April, when he voted against the Obama budget on deficit grounds, but then the same day voted for the Kyl-Lincoln bill , which disincentivized charitable giving while offering non-offset tax cuts for the richest Americans.
SDD… love it!
I would suggest you steer clear of criticizing the Senator for any lack of military service. When he graduated from college, the military was looking for reasons to turn people away rather than to enticing them to enlist. I doubt he looked into it, but good ole’ Dad would have had to pull a whole different set of strings to make that happen. At the time, the thought of eventually becoming a veteran was no longer considered a political plus. It was a couple of years before that changed, and by then Evan’s path had already taken a decisive turn in another direction.
Still, it does seem that certain politicians who have had little familiarity with the military do overly cherish the ability to be armchair generals.
Hopefully Obama in his Afghanistan speech tomorrow will not duck the issue of how the new contingent of troops will be paid for.
I’d feel a lot better about Evan’s deficit hawkishness were he to spell out specifically how he would balance the budget. What programs or entitlements would he cut? A favorite saying is “Everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.” It can’t be done. Evan wants to cut spending but doesn’t want say how.
Have never liked Evan Bayh. If he were Evan Smith, he would have never become governor, let alone senator.
Well, Bayh can well be taken to task, but alas, he isn’t the Commander in Chief, who is the armchair general without military experience who matters. In the area of foreign policy, this just looks like Bush’s 3rd term to me, in the meaningful ways. Sure, Obama bows more deeply and reaches out in speachifying ways, but darned if this surge thing hasn’t been tried out before.
How will it be paid for? In human lives, per usual. Are we causing the rest of the world to love us yet?
The overwhelming majority of Americans supported the war, and I think that today they need to reckon publicly with why they no longer think the mission is that important, or why they demanded invasion when the blood was up, Graveyard of Armies and the world’s great nuclear hot-spot be damned.
And Doug’ll tell you I’m no Obama apologist, but 1) he’s doing exactly what he promised during the campaign, and 2) voters had a chance to elect the guy who wore his ribbons on his sleeve. No President of the United States in our lifetime is going to approach sanity in military policy; the best we’re ever going to hope for is a reduction in the incontinent spending on every military gee-gaw and Third World intimidator on the drawing table (ten more aircraft carriers, anyone?). Sheesh, look at the furor over canceling the F-22.
By the way, Mike, look at the disasters a succession of combat-experienced Presidents, from Truman to Nixon, embroiled us in. Compare FDR and Lincoln. Presidents dispose, often wrongly of late because at the service of a doomed US military hegemony, but it’s Congress which has kept us on a permanent war footing since 1946.
Doghouse has a point about Congress. Congress is supposed to decide IF we fight at all. The President is to decide HOW we fight.
If you’re mad about Obama adding more troops, then fine. However, if you’re mad because we’re still in Afghanistan, call your Congressman.
I doubt that John McCain’s military experience would have stood the United States in good stead had he been elected. McCain’s captivity had to have been horrific, and I respect his service immensely. I do not think, however, that his experiences mean that he has some special insights as to how to fight wars. As far as I know, he was never in any command position. What I’ve heard from him are bellicose talking points that may satisfy a certain segment of people here in the United States, but are more than likely not sound strategy or policy. No matter what President Obama has or hasn’t done thus far, I am thankful every day that McCain and Palin are not President and VP.
I’m not sure that Obama had or has any good choices concerning Afghanistan. No matter what he does he’s going to be attacked by the left and/or the right. No matter what he does, Afghanistan will likely remain unstable and a haven for terrorists. Furthermore, let’s not forget that the war was started over eight years ago. During the first seven years of the war, someone else was President, and his options weren’t any better. As for the bowing more deeply, what the heck does that have to do with anything? Other Presidents have “bowed” to world leaders. Give it a rest.
Doghouse, Jason- Congress is *supposed to* declare the wars, and they well have been authorizing funding for the wars we’ve been waging almost continuously over the past 6+ decades, but fact is, since WW2, there hasn’t been a single Constitutional war. *All* have been initiated at the discretion of the various Presidents, and not declared by the Congress, as specified by the Constitution.
Agreed, Mike. And, furthermore, this is one of the worst symptoms of the (non-organic) expansion of Executive power since the early 1900s. We wanna throw our weight around, but we can’t do so efficiently (or as secretly), so we skirt the law and make “Commander-in-Chief” synonymous with “President”.
That, however, was Jason’s point; mine was that our perpetual militarization, the crossing from national defense to international bully, and the perpetuation of massive programs we’ve known for forty years now had no real defensive purpose–ICBMs, a five-ocean Navy (ten aircraft carriers! and the keel laid on the first of the new class which is supposed to replace every last one), 80% of the air force (78% if we want to keep those sporting-event flyovers), and a militarized space program/command-control system the Chinese already know how to disable, and very likely could–is an ongoing Ponzi and Pork platter Congress is most responsible for, not that most Presidents since Truman have had to be dragged along kicking and screaming. Those who did spent much of their time defending themselves politically, not shaping future military spending. Hell, you can still find people who want to fight Jimmy Carter over the POS B-1 program.
I disagree on ICBMs. They had one purpose: scare the hell out of anyone else that has the ability for massive nuclear strike so they don’t do it.
As insane as the logic was, it worked. Show me one example of an ICBM being used for offensive purposes.
The rest is a debate over us fighting wars on our own shores or on someone else’s back yard. I understand the logic of “somewhere else”, and the resulting massive Navy and Air Force that is a result of that thinking.
Our problem has been that since we had a good idea and created good tools for it, we got tired of waiting for a good time to use them.
I could see a counter-argument now for dropping the “extended defense/offense” part of the Army now, since our enemy has been nation-less gangs.
However, the downside of going to a plan of just defending the US on its own soil is that we REALLY start treating everyone in our borders as a potential terrorist.
Yes, I know we doing a lot of that today, but even my limited imagination can think of a FAR worse police-state that we could end up in.
That’s the post-facto rationale for the arms race; it wasn’t our original intention to inhabit a shared-destruction world, and it wasn’t every administration’s policy once massive overkill levels were reached on both sides. As for their use, no, they haven’t been used, and we are here talking today. But the US has never renounced first-strike capability; it was the developer of the neutron bomb; it was the one who spent, and continues to spend, on the Star Wars program designed to break the stalemate; it made and maintains plans (or fantasies) for “limited” battlefield use; and it refuses today to reduce its nuclear arsenal (though it has “reduced” the number of “operationally deployed” missiles at any one time).
The point was that we pay to maintain a force capable of destroying life on earth hundreds of times over, even after the rationale–always more hype than reality–if such a thing can even be imagined, has all but disappeared.
Likewise, I don’t know who said “national defense stops at our borders”, except it wasn’t me. My point is that we pay for billions, even trillions, more than can be justified by any reasonable analysis or expectation of safety.