There Are No Military Spending “Cuts”
The reason Ron Paul can offer $1 trillion in spending cuts and the other Republican candidates offer nothing is because the other Republicans behave like liberals when it comes to Pentagon spending. In fact, when Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum say President Obama is “gutting” the military, they use the same argument liberal Democrats once leveled at President Reagan. Explains Doug Bandow at The American Conservative:
The third idea spendthrift militarists have recycled from the liberals of yesteryear is using “baseline budgeting” to complain that Barack Obama has “cut” defense outlays. This is the same way Democrats once charged that Ronald Reagan drastically “cut” domestic spending—by reducing the rate of increase.
Total military outlays were $306 billion in 2001. Since then they have risen steadily, breaching the $700 billion barrier under Barack Obama in 2011. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, expenditures increased 74.5 percent over the last decade. In the Obama administration’s first two years inflation-adjusted military spending rose 16.8 percent. Outlays last year, in real terms, were 23.5 percent above the Korean War peak in 1953, 22.5 percent above the Vietnam War peak in 1968, and 35.8 percent above the Reagan build-up peak in 1989.
Spending will stop racing ahead this year but not because of real cuts: the administration has only proposed reducing planned increases over the coming decade by $487 billion. As former House Majority Leader Richard Armey observed, these “cuts” are “only from the bloated CBO baseline. This means that [Obama] is merely reducing projected military spending, as opposed to cutting current spending.”
