As the committee of 12 buckle down to the task of prescribing another $1.5 trillion in budget savings over the next decade most of them will be faced with the vote-killing prospect of putting thousands of defense workers on the streets.
Not by accident, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Raytheon Co. and Boeing — along with smaller companies with Pentagon orders — have plants in several states. As a result of this deliberate geographic dispersal, it has become politically difficult to cut defense spending. So it was inevitable that the six Democrats and six Republicans on the select committee charged with concocting deficit reduction would have defense plants in their states that they would try hard to protect.
With this in mind, congressional leaders came up with a draconian either-or plan. If the 12 couldn’t come up with deficit reduction specifics that would be accepted by both the House and Senate and be signed into law by President Obama, then spending would be cut across the board — with about half of the reductions coming from the Pentagon.
That prospect has been called the “doomsday” alternative by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. It is an adjective that Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington state senator, doubtless finds appropriate. Boeing has 30,000 employees in her state making refueling tankers for the Air Force. Big defense spending cuts could devastate Washington’s economy — and put Sen. Murray’s political career in jeopardy.
Other defense plants in the home states of the committee members employ hundreds of thousands of well-paid workers. Trimming back those production contracts and pulling the plug on additional Pentagon purchases throughout the nation would send unemployment soaring. As workers were laid off, their spending would be cut way back, state and local tax income would shrink and their communities would feel pain that felt like a new recession.
Today’s ultra-conservatives rail against what they call “job-killing taxes” and, in the next breath, call for budget cuts that will actually throw thousands on the unemployment rolls. It is time that they admit that jobs paid for with tax dollars — as every defense industry job is — are vitally important to the nation’s economy.
The “doomsday” alternative gives all 12 committee members a strong incentive to come up with deficit reduction specifics, which can be sold to majorities in both the House and Senate and win the president’s signature.
The prospect of cutting all government spending across-the-board by a specific percentage should be just as fearful to the 12 as slashing the Pentagon’s budget with a meat ax. Such reductions are mindless. All government programs aren’t equal. In recessions, the number of the poor increase, so spending on Medicaid, the homeless and other victims of a stalled economy should rise, not fall. Spending on Medicare should rise along with the increasing number of those eligible for the program, etc., etc., etc.
Spending decisions must be made program by program if they are to be wise decisions. Across-the-board thinking leaves reason off the table.
ONE WOULD ALSO hope that the “doomsday” threat would persuade at least a majority of the 12 to include increases in federal revenue in their prescription along with reasoned spending cuts.
As billionaire Warren Buffett argued so persuasively in Monday’s Register, it makes no social or fiscal sense to continue to coddle the super rich. They can well afford to pay their share of the cost of running the government. And that share increases as the impact of budget cuts reduces the amount government spends to benefit middle and lower income groups.
In short, the deficit-cutting dozen should keep all Americans in mind as they tackle their next-to-impossible task.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
