The Waste-Bloated Elephant in the Deficit Discussion Room

Blue Girl wrote yesterday that war funding is deficit spending and if the deficit hawks weren't scum-sucking liars, they'd start their austerity crusade at the Pentagon.

Now one of our favorite members of Congress is doing just that.

John Nichols at The Nation:

Well, if Obama and (Rep. Barney) Franks' other fans really want to celebrate the congressman’s contribution to the economic discourse, perhaps they should start listening to what he is saying about how to balance the federal budget.

Frank wants to cut $1 trillion in unnecessary—let’s be blunt: wasteful—spending over the next decade.

How so? By hacking away at excessive Pentagon spending.

A crazy notion?

Republican Ron Paul doesn’t think so.

The libertarian-conservative congressman from Texas is Frank’s partner in this project.

This unlikely pairing has led the fight to get the federal deficit reduction commission to, in Frank’s words, focus on the fact that “unless there is a substantial reduction in American military expenditures over a ten-year period close to if not slightly over a trillion dollars over what’s proposed—that is at $100 billion a year—you simply cannot deal with deficit reduction in a way that is economically and socially responsible.”

Frank—working with Paul, North Carolina Republican Congressman Walter Jones and Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden—put together a remarkable left-right coalition of budget and defense-policy analysts in a “Sustainable Defense Task Force” that included everyone from the Center for American Progress’s Larry Korb, Peace Action’s Paul Martin and the Institute for Policy Studies’s Miriam Pemberton to Laura Peterson of Taxpayers for Common Sense and Christopher Preble, the director of foreign policy studies for the libertarian Cato Institute.

Based on the task force’s recommendations, Frank and Paul are making the rounds of the blogosphere, cable television and talk radio to propose Pentagon cutbacks. As such, they have become the most recognizable, and politically potent, proponents of a serious approach to deficit reduction.

Here is the argument that Frank and Paul are now making on behalf of what should be the next big fiscal project not just of the congressman from Massachusetts but of the president who heaped so much praise on him Wednesday:

SNIP

Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates refers to Pentagon spending as “the gusher” and dismissed the notion that it is difficult to find waste, fraud and abuse in a budget that “adds up to about what the entire rest of the world combined spends on defense.”
"Only in the parallel universe that is Washington, DC, would that be considered 'gutting' defense," says Gates, who has done a great service by opening the space for honest debate about defense spending.

Barney Frank—with a crucial assist from Republicans such as Ron Paul—is filling that space. As Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib notes, “Reps. Paul and Frank are doing more than writing a blog post.… These two odd-fellow members of Congress are harbingers of things to come. Annual defense spending has more than doubled over the last decade, largely because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But now the deficit is high, the debt is growing, and those wars are winding down, one way or another. So the parallel move to wind down Pentagon spending is coming. The only questions are how big the urge to curb will be, and what form it will take.”

If Obama was serious about his praise for Frank, the president should now embrace the congressman’s call for a realistic approach to deficit reduction that begins by making necessary cuts to a bloated-beyond-belief Pentagon budget.