There’s a story about a fellow leaving a bar late at night.
As he walks through the parking lot to his car, he sees a guy on all fours,
moving first one way, then another, his hands moving from spot to spot in front
of him.
“You all right?, “ he asks, “Something wrong?”
“Yeah”, the guy replies, “I lost my car keys.”
“Maybe I can help. Where’d you drop them?”
The guy points toward an area yards away from where they
are. “Over there,”he says.
“Then why are you crawling around over here/”, the man asks.
“The light’s better over here.
That, my friends, is a metaphor for the Republican approach
to cutting the budget.
The problem really is
over there, some distance away. In the budget game, it’s a decade or more away. Social Security
is not bankrupt. And any problems
with it long term are easily dealt with, if action is planned and taken
sensibly. Medicare is in trouble, long term, but cutting its benefits is
undermining the contract we made with our citizens, present and future.
These programs are labeled ‘entitlements’ as if entitlements
is a pejorative term, They are
entitlements – because the people who had monies taken out of their paychecks
for decades did that so they would have the services they need when they need them. They paid for them – they’re entitled.
Even if there was need for financial adjustments, there is
plenty of money to go around. If we cut
waste. Now, let’s see if we can agree on where the waste is – what’s wasteful
and what’s not.
Let’s look at defense spending. We’re coming off the second
of two wars that cost lots of money and
made lots of money – for a few
Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Pratt & Whitney, Halliburton, the list goes on.
It cost lives as well, hundreds of thousands of lives (over
8,000 US military, over 601,000 violent deaths for just the first three years
in Iraq alone) . It brought us an
entirely new and HUMUNGOUS security infrastructure, threatened our privacy
rights and militarized local and state police forces and national guards.
Our $700 BILLION defense budget is coming down, to just over
$500 BILLION, still more than the TOTAL combined budgets the next 16 nations, most of whom are our allies, and some six
times China’s budget.
Further, what it’s buying us is more military equipment,
arms we’ll never use because the nature of warfare has changed, and that
equipment is obsolete.
Let’s talk another time about Government programs that can be cut deeply and sensibly, were it not for the fact that the
companies involved are major contributors to our legislators.
The best way to make sure we’re looking at ALL options is simply to look at the Cabinet posts:
Agriculture
Commerce
Defense
Education
Energy
Health and Human Services
Homeland Security
Housing and Urban Development
Interior
Labor
State
Transportation
Treasury
Veterans Affairs
Attorney General
No comments:
Post a Comment