These days, virtually all Republicans call themselves “conservatives” and claim to be dedicated to cutting spending, balancing budgets, reducing debts and limiting government. Most of them are liars. The failure of the super committee this week was but the latest reminder.
The super committee was supposed to figure out how to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion over 10 years. If it failed, the result was supposed to be $1.2 trillion in “automatic cuts” over the next decade, with about $600 billion of that coming from the defense budget. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said any such cuts would be “devastating” to our military. Many prominent Republicans agreed with Panetta. Mitt Romney said: “We cannot put America’s safety in jeopardy by virtue of the failure of this committee.” Michele Bachmann echoed that sentiment: “We can’t do that to our brave men and women who are on the ground fighting for us.”
When conservative Republicans say they want to cut the Department of Education, the Department of Energy or anything else, liberal Democrats shriek that Republicans will “devastate” education, energy and any other part of our government that does not remain 100% intact. Conservatives rightly recognize this as a liberal scare tactic designed to prevent anyone from downsizing a federal government that so desperately needs downsizing. What separates liberals from conservatives is that whereas liberals love big government and will tell any lie to protect it, conservatives hate big government and will cut it at every opportunity they get — or at least this has long been perceived as the divide in American politics.
I stress the word “perceived,” because when it comes to Pentagon spending, too many Republicans still behave exactly like liberal Democrats.
The truth is that we don’t need to spend as much on defense as we’re spending now. We’re spending more on defense than at any time since World War II and almost as much as every other nation combined. Senator Tom Coburn has suggested that if we are going to start cutting, the Pentagon is the most logical place to start precisely because it is the most wasteful. But even more importantly, these “devastating” automatic cuts that are supposed to happen aren’t really cuts. As Senator Rand Paul explained on CNN the day the super committee failed:
This may surprise some people, but there will be no cuts in military spending because we’re only cutting proposed increases. If we do nothing, military spending goes up 23% over 10 years. If we [make these cuts], it will still go up 16%.
The problem is there’s simply no way to actually do what every Republican loves to talk about — limiting government, balancing budgets, cutting waste — without reducing defense spending. After entitlement spending, defense spending is the second largest part of our budget. You could feasibly gut the entire entitlement system and not touch Pentagon spending, but what politician is going to tell America’s seniors they must do without so Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and God-knows-where-else can have more?