GOP candidate aims to raise defense spending
With the 11th anniversary of the attack of Sept. 11 in our rear-view and the bitter taste of the attacks on United States embassies in Egypt and Libya still in our collective mouths, many people are concerned about the current state of America's foreign policy. Not to mention the evidence released a few days ago by the U.N. atomic agency that claims that Iran has moved closer to building their first nuclear weapon. With the presidential election rapidly approaching, Americans need to consider foreign policy when they cast their ballot because, admittedly, it is not the greatest problem facing America today, however it is a major issue that cannot be skipped over.
This is exactly the problem I had with Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention two weeks ago. There was no mention of foreign policy, of the War in Afghanistan or of continued United States military presence in the Middle East. He barely even mentioned Iran, and when he did, he scoffed at any diplomatic effort to talk with the Iranian government. In the meantime, he laid out his plans to balance the budget, decrease the debt and get America back to work again.
Right now, the Budget Control Act of 2011 has required that the next decade's base defense spending figure be $6 trillion as opposed to $6.5 trillion and if the second part of the act, sequestration, were to take effect an additional cut would occur and the figure would be somewhere around $5.5 trillion. If Romney were to be elected, he would actually want to spend about $8.3 trillion on defense over the next decade.
The really strange thing here is the dichotomy that the Republican party presents. The idea that on the one hand you can say, "Oh, spending is a bad thing and we need to do less of it, but don't you dare touch the defense budget unless you want to pump it up some more." You cannot do that. That does not make any logical sense whatsoever. Striving to spend even more money on defense, while at the same time saying you are going to balance the budget and lower taxes makes no sense at all. I really want to understand the math here, I really do, but it is not there.
The Republican party holds a debt clock above their convention, yet they ignore that President Bush helped to rack that up through tax cuts and high defense budgets. Now they have a candidate planning to do the exact same thing as the last Republican president, and we all know how that one turned out.
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again — expecting a different result — and although I would not go so far as to say that Romney and Bush have exactly the same policy, it's safe to say that Romney has got some explaining to do when it comes to how he plans to pay for that defense budget.