Conservatives and Republicans: Obama Taking Money From Military To Pay For Agenda

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Here’s the spin you should expect to hear in the coming days and weeks: Obama and the Democrats are cutting defense spending (read: making Americans less safe) to free up money to spend on separate liberal agenda items.

There were whisperings along these lines a couple weeks ago, but the framing appeared in full force yesterday in the Wall Street Journal in an op-ed by Thomas Donnelly and Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute.

They write: “Mr. Gates justifies these cuts as a matter of ‘hard choices and ‘budget discipline,’ saying that ‘[E]very defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk . . . is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in.”

But this calculus is true only because the Obama administration has chosen to cut defense, while increasing domestic entitlements and debt so dramatically.

The budget cuts Mr. Gates is recommending are not a temporary measure to get us over a fiscal bump in the road. Rather, they are the opening bid in what, if the Obama administration has its way, will be a future U.S. military that is smaller and packs less wallop.

This thinking has already made its way down the road to Capitol Hill. Rep. John Sullivan (R-OK) complains that “[w]hile the administration is socializing business and spending by the trillions, they want to cut spending that is essential to the safety of our homeland.” He’s joined by a number of Republican members of the House Armed Services Committee, including J. Randy Forbes (R-VA), who made the more explicit argument that the supposed cuts aren’t just coincidental to domestic spending initiatives, but actually a result of them.

“Today’s announcement of defense cuts is a reaction to the fiscal strain caused by trillions in bailout and stimulus spending, rather than a result of regular strategic review and overall threat analysis,” Forbes said. His home state of Virginia trails only the District of Columbia in per capita defense spending.

It’s important to note that defense and domestic spending are not zero-sum–they do not come out of a single, finite pool of federal funds. The Congress can (and may very well) radically change the administration’s proposal and further increase the bottom line, and it is not prevented from doing so because of other major spending initiatives.

Late update: Spencer Ackerman catches Schmitt and Donnelly citing Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest in their critique of the first black president and his plans for the Pentagon.

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