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National News See other National News Articles Title: The GOP Is AWOL on the Fiscal Front Yet Again Here they go again. The House GOP leadership is fixing to sell-out the nation’s fiscal future still another time in order to protect missions that have nothing to do with true conservative governance. We are talking about: Playing policeman to the world with a hideously expensive Warfare State. Owing to the above GOP follies, the so-called conservative party has once again fallen flat on its face fiscally, having passed only one of the 12 appropriations bills for FY 2024 to date. And that’s even under the ultra-lax ceilings agreed to in Speaker McCarthy’s capitulation to the Washington spenders during the June debt ceiling showdown. Not surprisingly, the only spending bill the full House has actually approved was the military construction appropriation, which is the very living essence of the Federal pork barrel. So now we have another continuing resolution (CR) which pretends to be a prudent stopgap, but actually amounts to Washington shenanigans as usual. It fully funds the DoD boondoggle at current levels of $858 billion, while pretending to hold nondefense appropriations to 8.1285% below current levels. Let’s see. The above nondefense cutback is effective for just 31 days and excludes the giant Veterans medical system, which has a current budget level of $119 billion. So what is being cut is one-twelfth of one-twelfth of the current $653 billion nondefense appropriations level excluding Veterans medical care. That computes to a savings of just $4.5 billion—a perhaps meaningful sum in the real world but only six hours worth of the projected $6.4 trillion of Federal outlays for FY 2024. So the question recurs. How in the world has the Republican-controlled House not been able to pass this year’s appropriations bills in the face of agreed-upon spending allowances for FY 2024 that virtually give fiscal profligacy a new definition? And we do mean profligacy. When Big Spender Obama shuffled out of the White House, the FY 2017 budget authority level for so-called discretionary appropriations—defense and nondefense combined—was $1.22 trillion. By contrast, the so-called FRA (Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023) sets a “cap” for FY 2024—including all the gimmicks and budgetary legerdemain —of $1.66 trillion. That’s $440 billion or 36% more than under Obama—yet these big talking GOP anti-spenders couldn’t even pass appropriation bills that conformed to this exceedingly lenient overall ceiling. Moreover, when you break down this staggering $1.66 trillion total between defense and nondefense spending, the farce of it becomes all the more apparent. On the defense side the GOP was long ago taken hostage by neocon interventionists, who, as we have previously detailed, have added at least $500 billion to the DOD budget beyond what would be needed for a proper Fortress America defense. But suffice it here to say that at the time the great General Dwight Eisenhower famously warmed about the dangers of the military-industrial complex in his 1961 Farewell Address the defense budget in today’s dollars (FY 2023$) totaled $400 billion. And that was at the peak of the Cold War when the Soviet Union possessed a decent quotient of industrial vigor, thousands of warheads pointed at the United States and 50,000 tanks lined-up on the central front that still had working parts and fuel. Yet after cutting the defense budget he inherited by upwards of 30% in real terms, Ike judged his outgoing budget of $400 billion to be enough even in those precarious times. By contrast, the US today is faced by no industrial superpower with either the means or motivation to attack the American homeland. The fact is, neither Russia nor China have the economic capacity—say $50 trillion of GDP—-or motivation to attack the American homeland with conventional military means. The vast invasionary armada of land and air forces, air and sealift capacity and massive logistics supply pipelines that would be needed to bridge the two ocean moats is virtually beyond rational imagination. So what ultimately keeps America safe is its nuclear deterrent. As long as that is intact and effective, there is no conceivable form of nuclear blackmail that could be used to jeopardize the security and liberty of the American homeland. Yet according to CBO’s latest study the current cost of the strategic deterrent is just $52 billion per year. This includes $13 billion for the ballistic missile submarine force, $7 billion for the land-based ICBMs and $6 billion for the strategic bomber force. On top of that there is also $13 billion to maintain the nuclear weapons stockpiles, infrastructure and supporting services and $11 billion for strategic nuclear command and control, communications and early warnings systems. In all and after allowing for normal inflation and new weapons development costs, CBO’s 10-year estimate for the strategic nuclear deterrent is just $756 billion. That happens to be only 7.0% of the $10 trillion baseline for the total cost of defense proper over the next decade and only 5.0% of the $15 trillion national security baseline when you include international operations and veterans. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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