In his address to the convention
This all cleverly misses the point. Sequestration was meant to be the scary stick to get Congress to take the deficit cutting medicine. What big defense budget boosters are trying to do with this line of reasoning is to protect Pentagon spending in the Super Committee deliberations as well.
It's no surprise that the Pentagon would scramble to protect its flank in these budget-cutting times, but the offense from Panetta, Congress, and industry is brazenly alarmist---and sometimes downright wrong. Panetta told Congress that sequestration would increase the country's unemployment rate by 1 percent, despite absence of any evidence. And presumed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney pledged in a speech to "reverse Obama's massive defense cuts." But the defense budget has actually increased billions of dollars under President Barack Obama.
Let's review some more facts. First of all, the $450 billion in defense cuts that the debt ceiling deal enacted would only lower the rate of increase in DOD's budget, a rate that has gone through the roof in the last ten years. Even the "doomsday mechanism" would only bring DOD's budget back down to the 2007 level---a pretty comfy one, considering war spending won't be touched.
Second, our country faces a $1.3 trillion deficit, and every part of the government needs to step up and trim down. As consumer of the largest piece of our discretionary budget pie, the Defense Department cannot dodge its share, nor can tax expenditures, entitlements, and other discretionary spending. There's certainly plenty of fat to cut at DOD: The agency buys more than $1 billion of goods and services every day; employs some three million people globally, more than the world's largest corporation; and its headquarters, the Pentagon, is the world's largest office building. If that doesn't epitomize Big Government, we don't know what does.
Finally, the chances of sequestration coming to pass are slim to none, and Forbes et al know it. Whatever the Super Committee produces, it will fall to Congress to adopt the recommendations or come up with some of their own. As we said, this full-court press on behalf of defense is likely an attempt to dissuade the committee from making any cuts at all, or prepare for the battle over programs that will take place in Congress over the coming years. Exploiting taxpayers' anxieties about jobs and safety is a cynical way to avoid making tough decisions that will affect our security for decades to come.
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