Remember those old bumper stickers about how it would be a great day when the Pentagon had to hold a bake sale to pay for a fighter jet?
Well, get ready to eat some Department of Defense muffins.
The Pentagon is getting jittery over the perfect storm of tax hikes and spending cuts set to collide during the lame duck session of Congress at the end of 2012. The DoD fears that Congress will look for spending cuts rather than suffer political fallout from the billions in tax hikes if the Bush tax cuts expire, and the defense budget would be a prime place to start.
This is all because of a recent study by the Stimson Center that suggests people are more than willing to cut defense spending if they know how much #$%#$ money we spend on defense. Via U.S. News, which apparently doesn't know how to use links:
Respondents were given information about the size of the yearly defense budget in several ways. After digesting that data, in "three of the five cases a majority of respondents said that the size of the defense budget was more than they expected," according to a study accompanying the poll results. "When asked for their conclusion, a large majority favored cutting defense."
In fact, respondents favored cutting the defense budget by 22%, suggesting that defense spending is "no longer sacrosanct," in the words of one Stimson Center analyst.
With the public softening on defense cuts, the Pentagon fears that when Congress begins looking around for easy cuts to make, the defense budget will look like food to a starving person.
They may be overreacting. Nobody wants to be on record cutting defense spending anymore than they want to be raising taxes. Cut one dollar of defense money and every potential attack on the U.S. is on your head for the remainder of your political career. The House GOP demonstrated this just last week, as they did everything possible, including cut food stamps and health funding in the midst of a depression recession, to avoid making any cuts to the Pentagon's budget.
However, Pentagon cuts have been gaining traction not just with voters, but with non-elected officials. Defense Secretary Robert Gates pushed hard for spending cuts last year, arguing for a leaner and more efficient military. Via Fred Kaplan, one of the most public proponents of significant spending cuts:
The way Gates squeezed out that $78 billion represents, at least potentially, the biggest cultural change that the military services have been forced to undergo in at least 20 years—wrenched from "a culture of endless money," as Gates put it, to "a culture of savings and restraint."
(And as Gates and anybody with two eyes who's ever seen a budget will tell you, these aren't actual spending cuts, but reductions in the amount the Pentagon's budget gets raised. They'll be fine.)
Until now, defense spending has been one of the untouchables of American politics. It's heartening to see more officials and voters head the bake sale route. And if that scares the Pentagon into tightening up a bit of their own spending, all the better.
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