Eric Cantor, the Republican congressman from Virginia who is likely to be the next House majority leader, wants federal spending cuts across the board–defense spending included:
The Virginia congressman said on CNN Wednesday that all discretionary spending should be cut to 2008 levels, including defense. He said taxpayers could save $100 billion in the first year, but did not specify a percentage for the reductions. Republicans had made that across-the-board cut a part of their campaign argument earlier this fall.
Cantor said the federal bureaucracy “has grown at a pace unseen, certainly, in the private sector. We’ve seen pay scales by federal employees grow nearly double in some cases to those market rates.” Cantor also said the pay rates must be brought down to “a level which reflects the market place pay.”
Cantor said the federal bureaucracy “has grown at a pace unseen, certainly, in the private sector. We’ve seen pay scales by federal employees grow nearly double in some cases to those market rates.” Cantor also said the pay rates must be brought down to “a level which reflects the market place pay.”
As a reminder, here’s Thomas Donnelly in this week’s editorial on how the federal government should approach defense spending:
It’s ironic but nonetheless true that as the world moves toward multipolarity, the demand for American security guarantees will rise. This is the explicit conclusion of Global Trends 2025, a report that summarizes the corporate wisdom of the U.S. intelligence community. Our military, however, is imperfectly prepared to play this role. Institutionally and bureaucratically, Iraq and Afghanistan may have improved the force’s operational prowess. But the force is too small, and it doesn’t have the weapons it needs for changing forms of conventional warfare.
The good news is that these problems can be solved by throwing money at them. Indeed, the defense budget is not only the most effective form of government spending, producing truly global public goods. It’s also the most efficient form of government spending—we get all those goods for about 5 percent of U.S. GDP. As a value proposition, that’s hard to beat.
Of course, at the moment, our collective minds are in a very different place. Pundits talk of American decline as a scientific inevitability. The Obama administration wants to spend money to reconstruct our domestic life while “resetting” and limiting “adventures” abroad. Conservatives, shocked by massive public debt and huge deficits, will do almost anything to constrain the size of government.
And yet we will have to get our minds around the facts of American global responsibility and America’s under-resourced defense, and soon. These topics may have been ignored in our current campaign season. But they will be part of the legislative agenda for a new Congress. And they will be an important benchmark in judging who should be our next president.
The good news is that these problems can be solved by throwing money at them. Indeed, the defense budget is not only the most effective form of government spending, producing truly global public goods. It’s also the most efficient form of government spending—we get all those goods for about 5 percent of U.S. GDP. As a value proposition, that’s hard to beat.
Of course, at the moment, our collective minds are in a very different place. Pundits talk of American decline as a scientific inevitability. The Obama administration wants to spend money to reconstruct our domestic life while “resetting” and limiting “adventures” abroad. Conservatives, shocked by massive public debt and huge deficits, will do almost anything to constrain the size of government.
And yet we will have to get our minds around the facts of American global responsibility and America’s under-resourced defense, and soon. These topics may have been ignored in our current campaign season. But they will be part of the legislative agenda for a new Congress. And they will be an important benchmark in judging who should be our next president.
