Be forewarned: For the next 13 months, we will hear with depressing regularity about the crude, blunt, draconian, devastating and quite possibly catastrophic budget cuts scheduled to take place automatically unless Congress reaches a deal to reduce deficits by $1.2 trillion.
Ignore the warnings – or at least refuse to take them seriously. Given the utter failure of the deficit-cutting supercommittee and the wheel-spinning we’ll almost certainly witness from Congress in 2012, those automatic cuts beginning in 2013 would amount to the most serious check on government growth in years.
In light of the urgent circumstances, they should be welcomed.
Instead, of course, defenders of the indefensible status quo are already signaling their resolve to save America from the threat of budgetary restraint.
“Those who have given us so much have nothing more to give,” proclaimed House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., in denouncing possible reductions in defense spending. Put that way, of course, it sounds as if the budget ax were poised to mangle military retirement benefits, or at the very least strip troops in harm’s way of life-saving equipment. The reality is more prosaic.
If Congress doesn’t act, defense spending could be slated for automatic cuts of roughly $492 billion from 2013 to 2021, or about $55 billion a year. Let’s try to put this in context. As Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., noted last year in a letter to the chairmen of the president’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, “Not counting the spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the ‘base’ Pentagon budget has increased from $407 billion in 2001 to $553 billion for 2011 in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the newest U.S. defense budget data. Over the past decade, this means a cumulative total increase of almost $1 trillion for the base DOD budget.”
Tally in expenditures in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as nuclear weapons-related activities in the Department of Energy, and we’re talking about a nearly $700 million annual outlay for defense – which of course doesn’t count spending by the Department of Veterans Affairs or the CIA.
Total Pentagon spending, Coburn says in his letter, is higher today, in constant dollars, “than at any time during the last 60 years. This includes the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Defense Department spending during President Reagan’s administration.”
It’s also more than 40 percent of all military spending in the world.
And yet we’re supposed to believe that reining in spending by $492 billion over nine years will jeopardize national security – even though the base Pentagon budget in 2021 would still be larger than it is today.
No doubt we’ll hear similar squawks about automatic cuts in domestic programs – and never mind that the law exempts Social Security, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and other programs for the needy, while limiting Medicare reductions to 2 percent.
Granted, the sequestration process that Congress set in motion when it created the supercommittee is far from the best way to reduce the deficit. And it leaves virtually untouched the largest debt drivers of all, namely entitlements.
But it’s hardly the monstrous affront to sanity that critics portray it, either – and at the very least is better than failing to act at all.
But of course, Congress in all likelihood will act. It will wring its hands and wring its hands and eventually repeal the mandatory cuts, even if it can’t agree to offsetting budgetary savings – and the president will likely go along despite his pledge on Monday to “veto any effort” to get rid of them.
We’ve seen too much of these guys to hope for a better outcome. It’s clear what many of them care most about, and it isn’t our colossal burden of debt.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
