Stop ******* spending so goddam much.
You're wrong. I've said many times on this board that spending definitely has to decrease. But as a Liberal, I want to see Defense cut first. That's all. Cut Defense 20% and I'd entertain cutting entitlements if you can show that you're actually ending fraud and waste and not just making life tougher on people who are already shit on.
I cannot take any "solution" seriously that establishes an arbitrary number like "cut defense 20%".
That kind of shit used to drive me crazy in the military. When I was an instructor, they told us "cut training by ten percent". They did not want to hear whether or not training
should be cut by ten percent. And it definitely should not have been. I considered that seriously destructive to our military readiness.
We should instead be looking at what bases we need, what interests we should be protecting, what interests are better protected by those who have more to lose instead of us, and so forth.
How many aircraft carrier groups do we need, how many MEUs, how many squadrons, how many army divisions, etc.
Then we need to right-size ourselves domestically. Means test entitlements, raise the retirement age, reform welfare, reform health care
the right way, and so forth. Eliminate or reduce programs that have either outlived or outgrown their original intended purposes. How many standards for eligibility for various government programs have we loosened over the years? Let's scale those back to their original boundaries. How many were never indexed to things like average lifespan or inflation that should have been?
We need to reduce our government in sensible ways, not with arbitrary numbers. If you say "reducy by 20 percent", then it becomes a political popularity contest to see who loses, and has nothing to do with making government
efficient.
After we do all that, then let's see how much that all costs. Then we can talk about revenue reform.
