Cutting the Budget Deficit

Dear Mr. President,

Dave Lindorff’s article, “War Addiction Default: America’s Political Dysfunction at Root is an Unwillingness to Cut War Spending” (http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1502) goes to the heart of our unbalanced budgets and ballooning deficit. He points out that the annual deficit runs about $1.3 trillion, almost the exact amount we spend each year on military-defense-national security. Have any of your economic advisers pointed this out? The Pentagon budget is bloated, wasteful and out of control; we spend hundreds of billions on “intelligence” (which isn’t), on arming the rest of the world—$3 billion a year to Israel, nearly the same to Egypt, $100 million a month to Pakistan to guard their border with Afghanistan… on and on. Yet cuts to defense are never mentioned, only cuts to other discretionary spending like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start and Big Bird. If we stopped the wars and started using some of that money to rebuild the countries we destroyed (see yesterday’s letter) we could cut military spending by 50% and the world would be a better and safer place. If you were a real president, Mr. President, you’d do that, stop the wars and cut the military budget by 50 or 60% rather than throw seniors and children and the rest of us under the bus by offering to cut Medicare and Social Security, education, child healthcare programs and other social services. If you were a real president, during the fiscal cliff fiasco, you would not have locked in the Bush tax cuts for millionaires or kept corporate loopholes intact. Instead, you’d have let the Bush tax cuts expire and raised the top tax rate on millionaires by 20% or 30% instead of that puny 4.6%. You wouldn’t have signed the 2013 NDAA either, or FISA, and you’d drop all charges against Bradley Manning and pin a chest full of medals on him. A real leader, a real Nobel Peace Prize winner, would stop all wars and use the peace dividend (remember that phrase from the Bush I era?) to rebuild America, to repair our shredded social safety net, fund education and health care, rebuild our infrastructure, our cities, our country, our lives. And since most Americans aren’t even aware we’re at war let alone understand the economic impact of it, it would all appear a miracle and you’d be a genius and a hero. What a legacy, the man who ended war and rebuilt America. No more fiscal cliffs or debt ceilings, no more unbalanced budgets or deficits. And you’d finally be worthy of that Nobel Peace Prize.