Timothy P. Carney likes Alan Grayson’s “The War is Making you Poor Act” which would carve out $159 billion dollars of pork from the defense budget, and give 90% of that money back to taxpayers, while using the remaining 10% to help trim the national debt. I like it, too. In fact, judging by the reactions around the web, it might be a semi-popular bi-partisan bill which would at once cut back the national debt and put more tax dollars in American’s pockets. It would also help the American people understand just how much of the defense budget is in fact little more than a massive pork barrel.
Of course, plenty of politicians and pundits on the right and the left treat cuts in defense as unpatriotic or as a sign of weakness. The philosophy of limited government ends abruptly when it comes to national defense, even though there is little evidence that spending $700 billion dollars a year on defense will keep Americans any safer than spending $500 billion dollars. Even after $159 billion in cuts, our defense budget is badly overloaded with pork.
