by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
Update: Okay, now I have to call for reinforcements. Someone has brought up the apocryphal "sea war with China" scenario, and I'm having trouble marshalling evidence to articulate just how many decades it would take China to catch up to American naval capability. Where's Robert Farley when you need him.
I believe this pie chart shows the relative levels of discretionary spending in the federal budget. Unsurprisingly, the defense budget dwarfs all other spending by a large margin. Since all of the various health care plans cost quite a lot of money, this means that any substantial boost in health care spending or deficit reduction will require cutting the defense budget.
In a perfect world, you could do this by revisiting the ratio of Army/Navy/Air Force spending that has endured since the Cold War. No one really questions America's naval or air superiority, and there aren't any competitors on the horizon, especially when it comes to the Navy. But in the world we live in, that's probably not possible. Still, it's worth going back to the armed forces and forcing them to decide which of the next-gen weapon systems are truly needed, and which are simply nice to have.
The band of dirty hippies that produced this chart, the Caucus for Priorities, recently endorsed John Edwards. In his foreign policy speeches, Edwards has been invoking Everyone's Favorite President To Invoke—Harry Truman—and proposes a Truman Committee-esque effort to separate the nation's defense priorities from those of defense contractors. I have no sense of how these various organizational endorsements play out, but it certainly sounds like C4P's 10,000 members are already caucus regulars, and that the group will work like hell to get them to the polls.
Photo by Flickr user desmoinesdem used under the Creative Commons license
—Signed, not Ezra Klein
