Tracy Potter: We Need To Reduce Military Spending, Just Not My Military Spending
This cynical double-speak from US Senate candidate Tracy Potter (who is actually polling worse against John Hoeven than national joke candidate Alvin Greene is polling against Senator Jim DeMint in South Carolina) made me chuckle:
BISMARCK — Reductions in military spending, including large cuts in the size of the U.S. Army, are necessary to reduce the federal budget, North Dakota Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tracy Potter said Friday.
Potter said he did not believe military spending cuts would need to include closing one or both of North Dakota’s U.S. Air Force bases in Minot and Grand Forks.
“I believe that our nation will be able to sustain a much smaller standing army than it has today and still be powerful,” Potter said. “This is where savings can come, and they have to.”
This reminds me of the “fiscal conservatives” and “deficit hawks” who attack national deficit spending, but then get red in the face defending the federal earmark for the local golf course. Because that spending is a-ok, right?
That’s a big part of what’s wrong with politics in America. Everyone wants fiscally responsible government, but nobody wants fiscal responsibility at the expense of their pet projects.
Anyway, I actually agree with Potter in so far as reductions in our military goes. Our military is still stationed throughout the world as if we were facing WWII/Cold War era threats. Not only does our global deployment not realize more modern threat sources, it doesn’t take into account the capabilities of modern military technology.
Our military could be cheaper, and more efficient, after a radical realignment. Unfortunately, though our military is one of the few things our federal government is doing that it should be doing it operates a lot like even the most pointless, waste-of-space bureaucracy in that a lot of times it wants to grow just for the sake of growing. And it never, ever wants to be downsized even if that downsizing could make it more effective.
And military leadership is often the worst sort of bureaucrat. They argue endlessly for more funding, and more power, just like other bureaucrats except in their case the politicians are usually afraid to take them on. Because they use our national security like a trump card for any challenge to their spending.
Though if we want to talk about federal spending problems, the military is about the worst of our worries. In 2007 global military spending, meaning all the spending on the military and wars in all the world including the United States, hit about $1.2 trillion. Or roughly $120 billion less than what America spent on entitlements in a single year in 2005.
If we want to get federal spending under control, we need to focus on the entitlements.
Tags: Military, North Dakota News, spending, Tracy Potter
