Absolutely 100% required listening from @AOC. Why in the world is our defense budget going UP while we’re involved in FEWER wars?pic.twitter.com/g8XJRZXGRg
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) September 22, 2021
The video is less than 2 minutes.
Brian Tyler Cohen is more of a journalist than the boys who make the big bucks.
Open thread.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
So am I. She’s right more often than she’s wrong, puts in the work, and she’s light years ahead of the likes of people like Nina Turner. Overall, I consider a net positive for the Democratic Party
E.
I just let out a cheer.
eddie blake
brian tyler cohen’s youtube videos are pretty good.
Splitting Image
She’s not wrong to ask the question, but C. Northcote Parkinson observed back in the 1950s that the budget would probably go up every year if the country had no military at all.
Cameron
Why does the defense budget go up with fewer wars? What do wars have to do with the defense budget? It’s for paying the contractors, silly.
James E Powell
Obviously, she hates the troops.
Captain C
@Cameron: It’s inefficient welfare concentrated in too few hands, but more than enough Congressional districts to make it very difficult to whittle away.
NotMax
Hey, those Space Force uniforms don’t come cheap.
//
Anotherlurker
Cue the “I hate AOC” tirades in 3, 2, 1……..
WaterGirl
@Splitting Image: did you watch the video? She makes the point that we just got out of a 20 year war and we aren’t funding things like child care and health care and other things that are needed. She was not asking a rhetorical question or a question with no larger purpose around it.
WaterGirl
@Cameron: I really liked her point about the big flurry of billions of dollars in year end money that has to be spent on contractors because if they don’t spend the funds this year, those funds won’t be in the budget next year. Whether they need them or not.
Arclite
The rise of China as a peer military power, throwing its weight around to intimidate its neighbors, annex their territory, and claim entire oceans for itself in violation of UNCLOS to which it is a signatory? Russia annexing and threatening to annex its neighbors’ territory? Defense spending today is half (3.5%) of its high during the Cold War (7%), as a percent of GDP. Now that authoritarian rivals like China and Russia are increasing their own military spending and showing they’re not afraid to use it for territorial gain, it makes sense that we would increase our own.
And for the record, I love AOC and her takes on most things. She’s smart and thoughtful.
Another Scott
Good sound-bites, but a bigger problem is that the Pentagon is so huge and so complex that it is extremely difficult to manage even by people of good faith. And Congress often makes it worse.
For example, her point about the rush to spend end of FY money is true, but it’s a reflection of the problems with annual federal budgets. Budgets are late, the money gets to the agencies late, planning gets messed up, money has to be juggled (some has to be carried over from the previous year in some circumstances just to keep paying salaries), orders get delayed, projects get delayed, prices change as a result of the delays, then there’s a rush to make up the spending timelines (there are rules about how and when money has to be spent on projects, etc.). When a year’s worth of work has to be done but the money arrives 3 months (or more) late, it’s a mess.
Or so I’ve heard…
Plus, the Pentagon is spread too thin – we all remember the stories of the Navy ships colliding because they’re understaffed and overworked. The Congress has given them too many jobs to do.
I’m reminded of a story about the US trying to get electricity working again in Iraq:
Complex systems are complex, and they aren’t easily or cheaply fixed without working on the whole system…
Lots of changes are needed at the Pentagon and in the way Congress does things. Lots. It will probably cost more, rather than less, money to fix them – at least for a time. Ending contracts costs money. Closing bases costs money. Buying people out or laying them off costs money. Hiring people to handle new or expanded processes costs money. Etc.
Arbitrary “easy” 10% budget cuts aren’t the way to go.
But it’s always good to think about what the Pentagon is doing and what it should be doing going forward, and people need to be willing to have those conversations about what the Pentagon should be doing, the real implications, and the real costs.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): better in the tent pissing (mostly) out
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Arclite: Also, bailing on the Forever War means the spending can be more focused so it totally doesn’t go nuts.
Splitting Image
@WaterGirl:
The party that started the war also enacted a tax cut that they justified by pointing out that it would specifically prevent the government from funding things like child care and health care. Spending as much money as they did on the war with no apparent benefit to either the U.S. or Afghanistan was justifiable (to a Republican) for the same reason.
The problem with the U.S. right now isn’t that too much money is being tied up in the defense budget. It’s that over 70 million voters in this country are actively opposed to spending money on services that AOC wants and the country needs. The defense department is just one of the sinks they throw money into rather than let it get spent where it would help people.
eddie blake
@Arclite: yeah. the navy is gonna need a fuckton of money over the next couple of years if they wanna match hulls with china.
Ruckus
The defense budget pays military salaries, equipment upkeep, replacement equipment, training, base costs, and daily operations.
The current budget is $705 billion with a $10 billion increase asked for. Is any of this to pay for the leaving Afghanistan, planes/fuel to get 125,000 people moved, a not previously budgeted cost?
Here is a breakdown of the DOD budget.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be smaller, but how much is too much? How much is not enough?
What we spend is approx 11% of the federal budget. Equipment does wear out and there is a need for replacement, some of our equipment is decades old, should it be replaced? I understand that the Navy is trying to get 50 yrs of life out of ships that used to need to be replaced in 25 yrs. Planes are only good for so many hours before they need to be replaced.
To me the biggest issue that we spend a lot of money and have been for a long time with wars every so many years that in hindsight (and a lot of foresight as well) completely without need/merit, in the quest to be considered the big swinging dick country. I think we’ve already won that award. Several times over.
Jim Appleton
What she speaks of is of a piece with an overall trend in Shareholder America.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Ruckus:
So when adjusted for inflation, which was 1.2% in 2020 and 3.53% for the first 8 months of 2021, the budget is being cut.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: The House-passed CR has money for the costs of Afghan resettlement, etc., FederalNewsNetwork:
Cheers,
Scott.
James E Powell
@Jim Appleton:
It’s also of a piece with Voters are Really Stupid about Some Things America.
Jacel
@Splitting Image: Also, that party (R) kept the money being spent on multiple wars they created out of the official budget, year after year, only funding those massive expenses as unanticipated emergencies off the books, year after year. Yay for Obama for ending that budgetary fiction, if not from disengaging out of those military fronts.
Another Scott
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: (I misread your comment, but I’ll keep this anyway.)
Comparing % of the budget can be misleading. Medical costs paid by the federal government were much lower in the 1960s. The manpower in the services was much higher in the 1960s as well. It can be tricky to do the comparisons in ways that aren’t terribly slanted.
We spend more than the “2% of GDP” that we want NATO countries to spend on defense. Our GDP (current dollars) is around $22.7T a year, so 2% for us would be around $455B/y. But no other country has the blue-water Navy or the rest of the expensive nuclear triad that we do, and many argue (rightly or wrongly) that that umbrella has kept Europe and the rest of the modern world from blowing itself up again in a world war, so it’s been a huge bargain…
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch:
Interesting take. I’m not sure that’s how it works but it does sound like it’s possible.
@Another Scott:
I don’t see, in a very quick read where funds for the actual evacuation, airplanes, pilots, fuel came from. Were all those aircraft military? For sure some of them were, didn’t the first one or two have a few more passengers than normally would fit comfortably? More like a few hundred of your newest best friends? That couldn’t have been cheap, I can’t imagine the hourly fuel consumption of a C5 or a C17.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
@Ruckus: Example: If you freeze Social Security today and come back 10 years from now, the monthly checks would be the same, but you’d have less purchasing power. It would be correct to say Social Security was cut because it didn’t keep up with the rise in inflation.
Another Scott
@Ruckus: I haven’t seen any specific number. I assume the Pentagon always has contingency funds available, or can get them from other parts of the government. Or, they just say “GO! We’ll figure out how to pay for it later!!”.
TaskAndPurpose:
Undoubtedly the FY22 defense appropriations bill will try to cover at least some of the costs of the evacuation.
Cheers,
Scott.
cain
@Arclite:
I would say that we have a lot of soft power that we can do. The world has been fucked up by both the British Empire and the Cold War. Enough is enough.
If we want to fight these rivals off, we need to fix our own house. We need to have a proper purposeful foreign policy that can help change the map. Be more kind, be more giving. It goes a long way.
China is getting a lot of influence especially in 3rd world countries or continents like Africa by helping in infrastructure. We need to do the same. Invest but also hold the line on corruption.
Omnes Omnibus
Saying you want to lop 10% off the Defense budget is sort of the leftist equivalent of saying that $3.5 trillion is too high. There are things in the Defense budget that should be cut out completely, things that should be trimmed, and things that should be increased. Tossing round numbers about with nothing attached is just a form of virtue signaling to a target audience. That being said, we sure as fuck should be funding things like childcare, healthcare, etc. The rhetorical point is valid; as a practical measure, it is not.
cain
@Splitting Image:
Because they are so afraid of “socialism” that they don’t want to spend the money for whatever historical bullshit. Spending on military is always a win because defense always makes sense and is a role in govt that really honestly nobody sees can be done by private contractors.
cain
@eddie blake:
Her complaints are still apt – why fund stupid shit from the past era? Fund and invest in modernizing our navy. We used to be pretty fucking good at doing that kind of shit. We have been resting on our laurels this entire time because the GOP and their media enablers believes the mediocrity is just fine.
eddie blake
@cain: i agree. i’m all for modernizing and upfunding the navy. they’re gonna need it. hell, they need it now. while the rest of the services have been focused on the middle east and flush with cash due to the forever wars, the navy’s gotten the short end of the stick.
Ruckus
I see a lot of good ideas, and even better none of them are about just blind cutting everywhere.
We do need good defense.
We do need to be able to help people as well as defend ourselves.
We need to figure out how to control firearms.
We need to figure out how to not have anywhere near as many poor people.
We need to tax the uber wealthy far more realistically, no one needs to be able to build a space shot for their vanity bullshit or to reconstruct a bad political party into a worse one.
We need to figure out how to get almost half our population to have a modicum of understanding of the word betterment and who actually is this country.
We need to figure out ways to drastically reduce racism and misogyny.
We need to do better as humans.
We need to get more people to understand the environment and how to apply fixes from many angles.
We need to figure out how to better educate our citizens. The post/comments about writing language, and so on the other day was good.
We actually need to live up to the concepts that this country was supposedly founded on, not the ones that the wealthy have used to further enrich themselves at the expense of the masses.
Just a start. (I’m basically retired and have a few free moments to ponder stuff.
Gvg
End the debt ceiling crap. Fighting over the budget twice instead of once has been detrimental and caused only harm. Once something is passed by a law and funded in the budget, it should be done. Cuts are specific and get decided each year in the budget. The Constitution says we pay our debts, therefore it shouldn’t be allowed to even debate defaulting. Having that second chance to argue in a setup that only allows hostage taking by morons who don’t understand how the economy works, provides only bad outcomes.
We didn’t used to have this nonsense. For decades though it got raised with no drama. Then it became a weapon of know nothing terrorists. It has never had value. Repeal that law.
JML
@Another Scott:
Pentagon will use cash from the budget to pay for these kinds of operational costs with an expectation that a supplemental bill of some kind will make them whole again. This is how you hide the real costs of a war by never actually budgeting for it and handling those operational costs off-book.
(I was still working for Army Budget when Afghanistan started and Iraq II started and they didn’t budget dollar 1 for either of them, always paid for using cash flow-reimbursement via supplemental. It was a fucking nightmare every year)