Big Defense Cuts, Oh No!

The Republican talking point goes like this, the sequester was Obama’s idea, so any drastic cuts that occur will be Obama’s fault.  This is odd on a number of levels, but if they can’t score points this way, the have added fear mongering over defense cuts, hoping to scare Congress into replacing defense cuts with even more cuts to domestic spending.  If they get there way, the impact of the cuts on the average American will be even worse than proposed under “Obama’s” sequester plan.

Bizarre.

Here is a headline on the Fox News website:

 

“Rep. Roby leads Republicans in asking Obama to take lead to avert drastic cuts”

 

Here is more from Martha Roby:

 

“In his State of the Union address, President Obama himself admitted that these cuts are a really bad idea,” Roby said Saturday …  “What the president failed to mention was sequester was his idea.”  (From FOX – allowed under fair use).

 

Again, this is funny.  In 2011, Republican Congressmen held a virtual gun to the president’s head – he proposed a way out by kicking the can down the road.  Hardly his idea.  Obama’s “idea” was to raise the debt ceiling, and support it, if necessary, by increasing tax rates to former levels. 

 

There is the lie that the president has proposed nothing.  Not true, he continues to look for ways to raise more revenue.  Now he is suggesting a hard look at tax deductions.  An example is the oil/gas depletion allowance.  Republicans may harp on tax reform, but they don’t want this one.  And yes, I agree that Obama’s team has not crafted a bill to send to Congress, but let’s get serious, if Mitch McConnell and John Boehner were ready to discuss deductions, a bill could be drafted in days. 

 

The depletion allowance is a curious matter, and no, I am not an expert, but from what I gather, you can use one of two formulas to calculate depletion.  The first allows you to deduct only actual costs.  The other is a percentage calculation.  Whether any depletion allowance is necessary is beyond me, but it seems troubling that a calculation on a percentage basis allows energy companies to deduct more than they spent.   Even so, this sort of calculation is not unknown in tax law.  We do something similar when we allow folks to deduct the business use of a personal car.  The IRS allows actual costs or a per mile figure – the per mile figure is overly generous to small car owners who use their car only on a limited basis.   

 

My point is that we need a careful and reasoned review of each deduction. 

 

By the way, depletion is not all that different from depreciation, and depreciation is a legitimate business concept that if not used, would make businesses assets appear far more valuable than they are.  For example – if you are a business and you spend $10,000 of cash on a large commercial printer, your balance sheet would show no reduction.  Even as you subtracted $10,000 from your cash account, you would be adding $10,000 to your physical assets.  So until you disposed of your printer, your balance sheet the full value of an aging printer (or office furniture or whatever you purchased).  Depreciation allows a business to account for assets and their use.

 

For oil and gas, again, it might be reasonable to allowing a depletion allowance of some sort.  But more than costs?  In any case, we need to consider this and all deductions, whether for business or personal taxes, on the basis of reason and fairness.  We need to hear from the insiders, but without self serving spin.   (And none of this fits the mode of discussion on the cable gabfests, not FOX, not MSNBC, not CNN).

 

And what about defense?  For many, defense is a sacred cow.  The Right wants to exploit legitimate concern for national security into forcing even bigger cuts on the domestic spending side – they hope to take advantage of a manufactured crisis to get what they want which is to cripple entitlement.  Some may also believe we need to maintain high defense spending – but Republican sentiment is posturing.

 

Defense gluttons keep pretending that if we cut, we will return the US to the state it was before WW2, when we had a military that was far smaller and weaker than our industrial peers.  But since we spend more than our peers combined, we would have to do a lot before we were near our former state.

 

And then there how we spend our money. 

 

Each service has its own air force.  Really.  So we have an Air Force and we have Navy, Marine and Army aviation units.  Makes some sense, but it also tends to duplication, and then we have the natural tendency for entities to expand (and develop a self serving story that does nothing to advance US defense needs).  

 

Then there is the hardware.   In WW2, the US produced thousand of aircraft, maybe 12,000 B17s alone and thousands more of various fighters, bombers, patrol craft and so on.  To refight WW2 with modern craft would cost $Trillions.  And that’s without adding the cost of tanks, small arms, jeeps and so forth.

 

We also need to reconsider each service’s mission.  Think of the US Marines.  Historically, they were limited to service on our wooden ships.  Think of sharpshooters in the rigging and men with swords who did the fighting when ships fought side by side.  They also did the rare land raid (think shores of Tripoli).  In WW2 the role of the marines expanded because of the unique nature of war in the Pacific, but we have not needed a beach landing (in a major war) since 1951 in Korea.  The marines have been engaged since, but their special skill, high risk beach landings under fire, hasn’t been needed in 60 years.  Perhaps we can retain their skill set via Special Forces, but we don’t need the current version of the Marines.

 

Then we have the Navy.  The battleship is a thing of the past.  And even the aircraft carrier is a problem.  Yes, it allows us to “project power” – but we can’t use them against a serious foe.  If and when we ever engage against China or North Korea, it won’t be with carriers, which would be blown out of the water by land based aircraft.  And what about our arch enemy,  Iran – they have a seacoast, but if we really went to war, our carriers would have trouble.  Iran’s powerboats could make navigation difficult, especially if we tried to launch and land aircraft.  And a protracted engagement can’t be conducted from aircraft carriers.  Nope – sorry you navy buffs.  The best use of a navy is against another navy, and in deep water.

 

By the way, if we ever really want to wage war against Iran – a seaborne landing would be a mess - our troops would be slaughtered (they almost were on D-Day, even with our air superiority).  We would need to come in over land from a friendly country (but who?).  Not Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan.  Turkey?   I doubt it. 

 

Air power only?  You jest! 

 

Since air power has existed, air advocates have attempted to design weapons that could wage war without ground forces.  Nuclear arms work, but unless we want to use enough of them to turn the Middle East into a wasteland, they are useless against Iran.  And as for drones – sorry, drones replace smalls forces and Special Forces, not whole armies. 

 

So there is no practical way to make war on Iran without risking death rates we could not stomach (either a sea based or land based war would be tricky) – likely an embarrassing failure that might spell the end to the myth of American power.   By the way, if you want to know why we went to war in Iraq, you must imagine the middle east as a chess board, with Iran the black pieces and Iraq playing white (and moved by us).  That explains our support for Saddam Hussein before we eventually turned on him, and it explains our interest in the several nations that surround Iran.  Of course our bungled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan put an end to all that. 

 

So what to do?  The reasonable thing would be to repeal sequester it and start over.  But reason is lost on the Republicans right now, so instead, keep the defense cuts as they are and keep pushing for more revenue. 

 

If I were in charge, I would do everything I could to make the cuts hurt more in Republican districts, but hey, I am not in charge. 

 

Post Script: yesterday, I spent 45 minutes in a dental chair and my dentist was watching Fox News.  The show was a breezy discussion between a few folks, one of them Wayne Rodgers (from TVs MASH).  Rodgers told us that the science on global warming has been debunked (really?) and the four of them used the increase in a federal program that purchases phone service for the poor (cell phones included) to indict Obama for expanding our government.  Sorry, the program started in 1984 and is funded from a dedicated tax.  The FCC already started cracking down too.  If we are looking to cable news for a reasonable discussion of the issues, we will be disappointed.