Thursday, June 7, 2012

Surprise! GOP promotes Keynesianism — military, that is

In recent weeks, Republican lawmakers have intensified their criticism of potential cuts to defense spending, departing from their budget-slashing script. In some cases, they have defended military spending as critical to the economic recovery.
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told The Huffington Post he believes military spending cuts would be bad for jobs. "There is abundant information that [there will be] layoffs of thousands … because we will have to cut weapons systems," he said.
"I think it would be devastating to the military-industrial complex," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said. "You'd lose thousands of high-skilled jobs and undermine our national security."
After a recent Congressional Budget Office report said the automatic cuts to defense spending set to begin in January would be bad for the economy, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told Politico last week that he viewed military spending cuts as the wrong prescription for the economy.
"The whole point here is to try to get some economic growth, job creation, to get out of this recession,” Kyl said. “Why would we risk going backward with policy that even CBO says would be the wrong prescription right now?”
Military spending is big business for an extensive web of industries and contractors that depend on the government to meet their bottom lines and keep thousands employed.
Read it at The Huffington Post

Military Should Be Exempt From Spending Cuts, Top Republicans Say
by Greg Rosalsky

Welfare spending? Needless waste. 

Buying tanks the Pentagon says it neither needs nor doesn't wants. Necessary.

3 comments:

Ralph Musgrave said...

Huffington really needs to re-write that article using monosyllabic words and sentences with no more than three words – else McCain and friends won’t understand it.

Roger Erickson said...

It's easy to understand why the new GOP can rationalize this approach.

Gov contracting now typically involves up to 30 sub-contracting steps, where the group actually doing the work gets only minimum wage - maybe even in China.

The rentiers extract 70% or more of public spending while doing nothing.

Yet to them, that is somehow not welfare.

Leverage said...

"is that really that fucking hard to do?"

Off course it is, they need the money for McMansions and consuming more resources than the average US citizen while they drive inflation up.

There are little things more inflationary than military spending.