Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, there is wide agreement that we should be taking tough measures to reduce the budget deficit. There appears at present to be a powerful myth that this can be done without attacking the biggest single area of increase in the federal budget in recent years, the military budget.
The transition from the Clinton to the Bush administration, which meant a transition from a surplus to a deficit situation, had as its single most important cause a decision by President Bush to fight two wars with five tax cuts. While President Obama has not repeated that same pattern, his announcement that he is going to begin deficit reduction, while exempting the ever-increasing military budget from the same scrutiny that goes to other Federal expenditures, means either that deficit reduction in both the near and long term is either doomed to failure, or that devastating cuts will occur in virtually every Federal program that aims at improving the quality of our lives.
I intend to work with many others to make the case that over the next 10 years we can save substantial amounts of money--a trillion or more of currently proposed expenditures--by reexamining some of the fundamental premises of American military policy. Some of those are based on Cold War assumptions--the need for three separate delivery systems for several nuclear weapons, which was designed in an era of confrontation with the Soviet Union. We also must suggest the notion that America can be the world's pacifier, policemen etc. Our security interest must be protected, and there are beleaguered nations threatened with hostile, foreign assaults where our support is justified. But our range of commitments goes far beyond that and must be scaled back.
There are also obviously places where the current military budget can be cut, even before we begin to reduce the level of commitments. In the very useful publication Congress Daily for Monday, February 1st a thoughtful and experienced journalist, who is an expert on the military budget, George C. Wilson, cogently rebuts the President's assertion that military requirements mean that we cannot subject the huge and growing Pentagon budget to the kind of scrutiny that goes elsewhere. Note that Mr. Wilson is talking primarily about a budget aimed at the current level commitments. A serious review of those commitments, which should result in a reduction in their scope, would allow us to go much further in reduction, reaching the magnitude of savings that are needed for us to be able to have the military budget make a substantial contribution to deficit reduction.
Madam Speaker, no issue before us is more important than the need for people to include a realistic assessment of military spending in any effort to reduce the deficit much less this year, or over the next ten. I ask that George C. Wilson's extremely well-argued article, which makes such an essential contribution in this debate, be printed here.[From the Forward Observer, Feb. 1, 2010]
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