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WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT AEI NOT BEING HACK-TASTIC? From Defense News:
As the "baby boomer" generation nears retirement age, U.S. officials should overhaul Social Security and other entitlement programs to ensure Washington can afford a robust military capable of thwarting future threats, according to an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) panel.Citing Bush administration data, the panel said the federal government now devotes twice as much federal funding each year to social insurance programs than to defense. The group, composed of two AEI scholars and a Wall Street executive, made clear their belief that domestic spending should decline so Washington can build a military capable of defeating any potential future foe. The duo at no point in the two-hour session called for terminating or scaling back -- as many in Washington have in the past -- any of the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar weapon programs. Nor did the trio call for reforms to the Defense Department's cumbersome acquisition process, which is sometimes blamed for allowing the development of new platforms to last for decades and far exceed initial cost projections.As far as I can tell, at no point did anyone consider the other plausible solution to having an enormously bloated defense budget and social spending, which is a tax rate comparable to other Western democracies. It should be staggering to watch Fred Kagan say, with a straight face, that the wealthiest country in the history of the world can't afford Social Security for its elderly and health care for its impoverished because it needs to maintain 50 percent or greater of the aggregate world defense spending. I'm forced, as I often am, to return to Arnold Wolfers's classic 1952 article "National Security" as an Ambiguous Symbol. Wolfers reminds us of three critical points:
1. National security can only be understood in the context of defense of national values.Something to remember when we're told that we need to slash Social Security in order to defend ourselves not just from "any potential future foe," but from every potential future foe at the same time.--Robert Farley
2. Absolute national security is unachievable.
3. Efforts directed towards national security invariably involve trade-offs with other values, either in terms of the freedoms we enjoy or in terms of the material well-being that we'd like to achieve.
