It begins: As entitlements grow, Pentagon to cut spending by $78 billion, reduce troop strength

There is only one cut liberals are willing to make, and that's to the military. Forget the entitlement spending - aka buying votes with our money - that sucks up the majority of the budget. Cuts now need to be made because of liberal overspending, and the military is on the chopping block. From the Washington Post via memeorandum: Pentagon to cut spending by $78 billion, reduce troop strength

...Under direction from the White House, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Thursday announced that the Pentagon will cut projected spending by $78 billion over the next five years and shrink the size of the Army and Marine Corps. The changes mean that the military would see annual budget increases that barely exceed inflation in coming years and that its budget will effectively remain frozen in 2015 and 2016.

Gates said the cuts are a result of the "extreme fiscal duress" facing the country. But they are also an acknowledgment of a rapidly shifting political sentiment on Capitol Hill, where senior Democrats and Republicans alike have suggested in recent weeks that defense spending -- which accounts for a fifth of the federal budget -- is no longer a sacred cow.

In a news conference, Gates said the White House's proposed budget for the Pentagon next year would be $553 billion, excluding the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, less than a 1 percent increase over what it requested for 2011. Although he said the military could live with flat budgets in the coming years, Gates warned that deeper cuts in troop levels, overseas bases and weapons programs would be "risky at best and potentially calamitous."

Just for a sense of scale, the deficit is running at around $1.5 trillion per year. Cutting $78 billion, or $0.078 trillion over 5 years is like taking water out of the Titanic with an 8 oz Styrofoam cup. It will make zero difference in the overspending problem, but it sure as heck will hurt the military. Relatedly, I had this September '09: Study: Obama Will Spend More on Welfare in the Next Year Than Bush Spent on Entire Iraq War. As it urns out, the numbers are quite revealing:

Cost of Iraq war during Bush's entire 2 terms (2003-2008): $622 billion (Congressional Research Service)

Cost of welfare for just the FY2010 budget: $888 billion

Or stated another way in terms what each household must pay each month:

Iraq War: $100 per month

Welfare: $638 per month in 2010

Striking, no? I also put a few graphs into the post above:

I agree with the spending proportions of 1945 relative to each other because the feds have the constitutional authority to defend the US, but not the authority to run social experiments via entitlement programs. Ever since the 1930s with the 'new deal', this country has gone downhill because of what I can only term vote buying via wealth redistribution mechanisms. That is not constitutional, and thus I oppose them. As time goes on, entitlements will continue to grow and swamp the entire budget. As a matter of logical fact, when you give away someone else's money, you run out of it at some point. Here's another graphic that I put up related to defense spending:

Again, defense spending is getting crowded out. Cutting the Pentagon budget that is explicitly allowed by the constitution to fund entitlement programs that are not is a mistake in my opinion. We need to reign in spending, especially of the entitlement variety, not expand it.

http://theblogprof.blogspot.com/2011/01/it-begins-as-entitlements-grow-pentagon.html

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