How To Really Reform Military Spending: Is Cutting Waste Enough?
Several new proposals to tackle out of control military spending have been released by Washington think tanks. They all identify areas of possible savings, but they are all missing the central point...
(Apologies for technical difficulties in the clip)
Several new proposals to tackle out of control military spending have been released by Washington think tanks. They all identify areas of possible savings, but they are all missing the central point...
(Apologies for technical difficulties in the clip)
Hello everybody and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, the co-host.
Daniels.
Yes.
We've advocated the fact and advertised that our government spends too much money.
And most people realize that, but nobody wants to cut anything.
But we're going to talk about whether or not we should cut money out of the military.
Of course, I think definitions are important.
I want to cut military.
I don't want to cut defense, but they always say defense, so everybody votes for it.
But a lot of military spending has nothing to do with defense.
But we want to pick up where Christopher Prebble led us into a political article.
And he, of course, is from Cato.
He had an article, the right way to cut wasteful spending, defense spending.
Well, I'm sure that there's a lot of different ways.
There's always temptation.
Well, all we have to do is have reform.
And we have to do that.
But that in itself is probably not going to be enough.
Reform is one thing, but change in policy is something else.
Of course, so far we've heard from the administration that we should deal with this.
And Trump has mentioned it, but it's through sort of an intimidation, you know, threats and say, wow, you do this, you do this.
And he's good at that.
And that may do some good, but that really doesn't quite solve the problem.
Speaking of Chris.
And Chris tackles one aspect of the problems with military spending.
And he approaches it in terms of what specifically you can do to cut what he calls, what a lot of people call waste, fraud, and abuse.
And he makes a good point starting out in his article that the U.S. military budget adjusted for inflation is more than the average budget at the peak of the Cold War.
So we are spending an enormous amount of money.
The question is, how do we deal with this?
We saw earlier today and yesterday that President Trump is going to instill a hiring freeze for federal workers.
That sounds pretty good, except the military is exempted.
So we can go into a little bit more about what Chris says if you wish, but I would point out his first point is close unneeded bases.
That's interesting.
But then his examples are only domestic bases that he thinks.
That reminds me of what happened probably in the 1990s when they closed down bases as a way of saving money.
And I was not gun-hoe over that process because they were cutting mainly the bases at home, which should be closed.
They're wasteful.
But I argued that policy should have something to do with this.
But if you cut some of the bases at home initially, although I think you should work for that, and building them more overseas, it doesn't solve any problems.
At that particular time, when they were cutting a few bases at home and getting a lot of grief from people at home, they were building bases at that particular time.
They were building a huge base in none other than Saudi Arabia, one of the principal's incentives for 9-11 to have come about.
And I think that's important.
So it invites the discussion about policy as well as these issues of how you tinker with the budget and the process, because I think it's more than that.
There are 800 bases like in the United States that they think overseas, say, worldwide, 800 worldwide bases in over 70 countries.
Yeah, and of course, if we had a policy of defense, this would be a lot different.
We don't need to be everywhere.
I think this is the opposite of defense.
I think it's an aggravation, like I point up about Saudi Arabia.
They had nothing to do with our defense.
It caused grief for us and still does.
And it still goes back to the old idea: why would people travel 6,000 miles to come over here if they weren't motivated?
And they say, well, it's a religious belief, which is something I don't buy into.
Well, Chris has a challenge in the way he approaches military spending reform because I think he designs his research to appeal to a lot of people inside the Beltway, and that's understandable.
That's where the action is.
The American Enterprise, all these other groups that are neocon dominated.
And I think he wants to try to moderate some of what they say.
But you're right, it ignores policy.
And policy deals with the 800 bases overseas.
And I was looking at Professor David Vine, he wrote an excellent book on worldwide U.S. military bases, and a couple of interesting points that he made.
The total cost of our bases and troops overseas is between $160 and $200 billion a year.
You want to talk about cutting military spending.
And most of these are in very wealthy countries, Japan, Europe, et cetera.
Yeah, there's a lot of room for cutting.
But what they're talking about here, this type of reform, isn't going to touch any of that.
And besides, even if there is a temp, you know, an inkling and they move in that direction, it really doesn't solve these huge problems, you know, huge amounts of money.
And even the weapons system, it's so ingrained in the system.
Even if you give, you know, the individuals that want reform and give Trump the benefit of the doubt, it's not going to be enough because the consensus is Republicans and Democrats alike will not cut the military budget.
And Trump said, no, we're going to spend more money on the military.
But he has to throw this stuff out there.
Well, where are you going to get the money?
Well, we're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, and we're going to have this amount of money, which I think is a dream.
They're not going to have it.
Eventually, the debt will be a problem.
Right now, they're flying high.
We still have lenders, and as long as people will let us print money and they'll lend it back to us, we're going to keep doing this for a long time.
But the one thing is, is the law, the economic laws of monetary policy is it doesn't last forever.
And that's when this whole thing is going to be a major problem, and it'll be a lot bigger than the problem we're talking about right here.
Yeah, I think the issue is the, I think the Beltway people see military spending reform coming, and they're trying to shift its focus in areas that are more palatable.
The idea that a tweet from Donald Trump to Lockheed Martin saying you need to cut a few million dollars off of the F-35, is that's going to solve the problem of a trillion-dollar total military budget is a fallacy.
But I think they're trying to shift this toward waste, fraud, and abuse, toward procurement reform, et cetera, et cetera, because they don't want to deal with the real elephant in the room, which is policy.
They feel if they can tinker around with managing some of these little crises, they can continue the policy as it is.
And that's their real goal.
And we obviously have a different goal.
Yeah, and it to me is a shame that Congress rolls over on this.
And one individual, and I like him, and I worked with him, Mick Mulvaney, who now, you know, is OMB.
And he has a lot to say.
But I was a little bit disappointed with his saying about, well, you want to now raise the taxes on Social Security and raise the spending on the military.
And they said, isn't that different than what you had when you were in the House?
He says, yes, but when I was in the House, that was different.
Now I'm not in the House.
Now I'm in the administration.
It reminds me of a story when one individual on the House floor had been voting with the hardcore, with the dozen of us that voted against the spending.
And all of a sudden he started voting in the wrong way.
I went over and talked to him.
I said, hey, how come you're not with us on this vote?
He says, well, I'm in leadership now.
So when you're a leader, you're an obedient follower.
So once you join the leadership, then your principles, and you rationalize.
It's not like you become totally unprincipled.
It's just that you become more moderate and you rationalize and say, well, for me to do any good, I have to be a player.
And that's why they said the argument was, Maran, you never did any good.
You just came here and voted no.
You didn't do any good.
But I think that doing the wrong things isn't doing much good either.
Even if you get your bills passed, okay, you don't want any spending.
Auditing Wars and Welfare00:02:37
They want a whole lot.
I'll get a bill passed.
I'm just going to spend a little bit less.
Or I'm going to have oversight.
But they don't talk about real oversight.
Oversight, I think, is great.
What about, you know, we've talked for a long time about auditing the Fed.
Great idea.
And people give token support for that.
Even Trump has.
But now he has somebody coming into the administration, Mnuchin, and he says, well, we better be careful about what we'll do with the Fed.
But if they're doing this, why wouldn't the charge be, why aren't we auditing the Pentagon?
How do we know about this?
Why don't we someday audit in great detail the people who perpetuate war and initiate wars?
And that's the CIA along with the military forces.
You know, they go in, the special forces.
I mean, that's what we need to know about, where they get the money.
And this is a bit cynical, but it's also a bit true.
If they don't have enough money to do all this secret fighting and warmongering, they get their money someplace else.
And we do know that they've used the drug war to get money to buy weapons when they're in the business of trading weapons and pay some of the bills.
So we need an exposure.
This is okay, but you're talking about just a little bit when we need a whole lot of reform.
But if they're not going to reform and reassess and reanalyze overall interventionism in foreign policy, it's not going to do the trick at all.
It's going to pacify people, give them a little bit more time, show that we're strong and powerful.
But I think we're still going to be very, very vulnerable, but maybe more vulnerable financially, militarily.
I don't think we're vulnerable militarily.
That's what gets to me.
You know, it's like, look at what they did prior to Iraq.
People in this country actually believe Saddam Hussein could launch an intercontinental missile and bomb us with a nuclear bomb, weapons of mass destruction.
I mean, they were convinced of this.
So I think we're very secure.
One thing is, is they're right when we have a great military.
If we are so great and so powerful, all the other countries put together, why are we worrying about massively increasing the amount the military is going to get?
We have good defense, and that's what we need.
We don't need more militarization.
That really is the question.
I mean, I wonder where the fault lines are, because I think that people have become accustomed to bread and circuses.
Role Shift Government00:07:03
You get your Social Security, you get your food stamps, you get all this stuff, and you get a great military where you can wave your flag and cheer on the troops in the wars overseas.
What's going to happen to Middle America?
And a lot of them are Trump voters, when all of a sudden they come and they say, Mulvaney says, Look, we're going to have to cut your Social Security benefits, we're going to cut your food stamps, we're going to cut your other benefits because we want to build the military up more.
I think people are going to become concerned, and maybe it'll work to our benefit.
Well, and that will be combined with something else that's going to hit home, and that is that the country and the government will recognize that prices are going up.
The CPI is going up right now.
They're fed a lie.
You talk about fake news.
Inflation is not a problem.
We're working on making it 2% because we just don't think it's good to have the destruction of the currency at less than 2% a year.
So they're working real hard at this.
I think price inflation is out there.
It's always been in the military.
That's why you pay $600 for a hammer.
If that's not inflation, I don't know what it is.
You have inflation in education.
You have inflation in medical care.
You have inflation in housing.
And it's doing that once again.
So there's inflation in the bond prices, inflation in the stock market.
So there's a lot of money, a lot of inflation.
But that psychology is going to shift because they're going to realize that they've been, and I think most people who are living on tight budgets usually say, I don't have enough money, can you raise my benefits?
They never say that the value of my dollar has gone down and it's because you have too much debt and you print too much money.
They don't say that.
They just need more money.
But I think inflation, the conventional definition of prices going up and CPI going up, that's going to hit when these other things are hit.
They won't be able to afford it.
And that's going to combine with a gigantic revolution for the people to wake up and realize this is a different story than tinkering around with waste, fraud, and abuse.
And of course, the military budget will come within, will come back within reason when we realize the policy.
What is the role of the United States and the rest of the world?
Is it to run things, to be the hegemon, to control the South China Sea, and to control troops in Poland on Russia's border?
Once we understand that our role is not to be an empire, then the budget will find a way to right itself, I think.
And I think you've touched on it.
It is the role of government.
And if they realize that isn't the proper role for our government, it's been shifting for a long time.
And of course, it started with the Spanish-American War where we reached out and started taking land outside our territory.
And it's been going on, but the role of government shifted.
It shifted on income taxes, shifted on the Federal Reserve and printing money.
It shifted on foreign policy.
It shifted on Keynesian-type economics, the whole definition of entitlements.
And we've lived with that for 100 years.
And now we have this $20 trillion that Trump talked a little bit about that.
Everybody talks about it.
They say, yeah, it's too high.
But how many proposals are we looking at in the Congress right now?
We have to house the Republicans, house, Senate, and the presidency.
And we'll have more control of the Supreme Court.
Now, what are the odds of them making proposals whether there's going to be anything cut?
Oh, yeah, we're going to cut some waste.
Well, what are you going to audit the finance activity?
Well, we don't want to mess around with an audit.
That's a little bit too revealing if you have a true audit of what the government is doing.
So the spending, unfortunately, is not going to be cut.
And they don't even intend to ever pay off anything.
And it's always the rate of increase in government and the debt.
And I think a couple years from now, you're going to see, once again, you know, the deficit on an annual basis being well over a trillion dollars.
And it would be totally not the importance of the role of government you talk about.
The other one is confidence, confidence in the system.
Why we are in the doldrums now, economically speaking, is there's no confidence in the system.
There hasn't been enough confidence to invest the money in businesses.
And a lot of things Trump says is absolutely correct.
The jobs are overseas.
People invest overseas because the tax code and regulations, he wants to change that, and that is good.
But it's not that simple because they have to deal with what is built into the system.
And right now we have the next recession built into the system.
The only question is, is how severe it'll be and how long it's going to last.
But when you do the amount of malinvestment and deficit financing and printing of money that we have been engaged in, especially in this century and especially since 2009, it's not going to, that big problem is not going to be touched when it comes to tinkering with this military budget.
We have to change what should the role of government be, and that is a big question.
And you know what?
I think if you put a question out to the American people and say, do you object to the idea that we promote a government that would protect your personal liberty and your personal privacy?
Would you object to a government that protects property rights and your privacy and your ability to do voluntary exchanges with people socially and economically?
And do you think it's time maybe we ought to mind our own business and we don't have to be involved in every single war in the world and we are not?
We're not the policemen of the world.
How many people do you think would answer that question favorably?
I happen to think a lot of people would.
Put that way, I think they would.
I hope so.
And I want to thank everybody for tuning in today.
And to me, it's important that we talk about the proposals.
The proposal that we dealt with today, there's some good suggestions there, and there's no reason not to do it.
I always support anything that would cut down on waste, fraud, and abuse, because that at least would be making an effort.
But my point has been made over 20 years that that's not the issue.
Like Daniel says, it's understanding what the role of government ought to be.
And if we don't ask that question, we won't have the answer.
We're going to continue to do what we do.
And I was disappointed that one of the major appointees by Trump says, well, I don't know whether it's time yet.
We ought to audit the Fed.
So I think the time has passed and we'll keep working on that because eventually it's going to be the big issue.
Just as foreign policy is the big issue.
And that is why hopefully we can continue to get our message out.
And I want to thank you very much for being with us today to the Ron Paul Liberty Report.