Be honest with me, James. How much of the Defense Department budget would you like to see eliminated before we cut the first dime out of the REST of the government? I'm guessing that you're not going to be happy unless the Defense Department is absolutely gutted. Am I wrong?[/quotes]
You are wrong. Because I'm not naive enough to think that every nation needs a way to defend its sovereignty from outside attack. But since I do not believe in either nation building or empirical growth of a nation, I do not believe we need anything other than what we should have to protect our own shores, and if we need to send some troops overseas to help allies in a joint effort that has a reasonable objective and stopping point, I'm for that too.
I'm not a budget analysis expert, so any percentage I give you wouldn't feel right for me to just toss out there. I would say that enough of a cut should be made to defense to enable us to not have to drastically cut important programs that people of both parties use. Like the Post Office, like educational grants, like medicare, like Social Security, etc. There is ZERO reason in this world to have such a massive Defense budget. Wanna know why?
Because if we ever did find ourselves back in a World War situation, know what we could do to cover shortages? Raise taxes and sell bonds...like has always been done, to great effect.
Here's the problem we face...we live in a world where some very bad people want us wiped off the planet. That isn't speculation on my part. It's the reality with which we have to deal. As I said before...I'm all for across the board cuts because I think ALL of the Federal Government is inherently wasteful and the only way to get them to become less wasteful is to hold their feet to a VERY hot fire.
I saw "A Few Good Men" too. I know about guns and walls and people wanting to kill us, blah blah blah. Again, see my above comments on this whole issue though.
They're the lunatic fringe of the Islamic faith, yes. However, again, see above. I'm not, nor are many, many progressives, in favor of eliminating our Army altogether. That's absolute rhetoric and whoever has been pumping that shit into your brains is a ******* troglodyte.
We have tough choices to make. We can pretend that being nice to the bad people will make them leave us alone but I think even you can see that is a strategy that isn't going to work. Bullies and tyrants respond to "niceness" by becoming more aggressive. Would it be great if we didn't have to spend billions on defense? Oh, yeah! Does it look like that's going to happen anytime soon? Sorry, but I don't see it.
Look at what happened in the Arab countries last spring. Democracy, real Democracy, sprang up there with no help from us. In Libya we did the bare ******* minimum. And Democracy still won-out. Don't you think the modern era will move us further towards cyber-based attacks and intelligence wars? Yes, people will still want to go and kill each other, sadly, but there is truly no need for an army like what we have now. There are ways to fund more wars if we need to (see above, again). So no, you won't convince me that the boogeymen being out there means we have to spend the most amount of our money on Defense. That's old school mentality gone awry.