Our country is in a perpetual state of war, with one country or another. While I support our troops and honor their sacrifice, our government has turned war into a business.
But more to your specific issue of spending cuts, nothing is off the table. Historically defense spending was always considered sacred, but it is no longer. It's a huge portion of our annual and national debt, and our maintenance of the military industrial complex needs a serious overhaul if it's to continue to be sustainable.
Ron Paul is one of the more ardent supporters of this kind of fiscal responsibility. He was in support of getting rid of the Department of Homeland Security entirely, as he felt it was redundant bureaucracy over the CIA and FBI. He also supported these types of measures because much of our spending on the military side goes to building permanent bases in foreign countries that we have no business permanently occupying. His philosophy of true conservatism was a non-interventionalist foreign policy, so I have to assume were he president we'd have been out of Afghanistan and Iraq already, and instead relying on cooperating with foreign governments and sharing intel more readily to catch and detain terror cells.
Not sure why this isn't bigger on here...
Superman save us
2011/01/24 09:36:42
Back home, tea partiers clamoring for the debt-ridden government to
slash spending say nothing should be off limits. Tea party-backed
lawmakers echo that argument, and they're not exempting the military's
multibillion-dollar budget in a time of war.
slash spending say nothing should be off limits. Tea party-backed
lawmakers echo that argument, and they're not exempting the military's
multibillion-dollar budget in a time of war.
Read More: http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2011/01/ap-te...
But more to your specific issue of spending cuts, nothing is off the table. Historically defense spending was always considered sacred, but it is no longer. It's a huge portion of our annual and national debt, and our maintenance of the military industrial complex needs a serious overhaul if it's to continue to be sustainable.
Ron Paul is one of the more ardent supporters of this kind of fiscal responsibility. He was in support of getting rid of the Department of Homeland Security entirely, as he felt it was redundant bureaucracy over the CIA and FBI. He also supported these types of measures because much of our spending on the military side goes to building permanent bases in foreign countries that we have no business permanently occupying. His philosophy of true conservatism was a non-interventionalist foreign policy, so I have to assume were he president we'd have been out of Afghanistan and Iraq already, and instead relying on cooperating with foreign governments and sharing intel more readily to catch and detain terror cells.
Private military contracts. We spend billions of dollars hiring companies like Blackwater to run covert operations when we should be relying on our military to do it.
Budgets of bases stationed in countries like Korea, Germany, Italy, or East-Asia that have been overstaffed and over funded for years.
Those are the first 3 that come to mind. And none of them are necessarily tied to the direct funding we do for on-the-ground active combat operations.