Wars of choice like Iraq, wars of necessity like Afghanistan, and wars of whim like Libya do not come cheap.
The true cost of Iraq is estimated to be closer to $3 trillion.
The pace of spending in Afghanistan is passing that of Iraq. "Afghanistan will cost nearly $105 billion in the 2010 fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, including most of $33 billion in additional spending requested by Obama and pending before Congress"
The price tag for Libya had already reached $750 million in May, with official estimates of the conflict costing the United States $40 million per month.
While the serious people in Washington scheme to cut programs Americans use, such as Social Security and Medicare, to trim the deficit, wouldn't it be better to start cutting programs Americans should never use?
From The Atlantic, "How to Shave a Bundle Off the Deficit: Spend Less on Nukes":
The government is set to spend almost $700 billion on nuclear weapons over the next 10 years... Most of the money will be spent without any clear guidance on how many weapons we need and for what purpose. Procurement is racing ahead of policy...
Meanwhile, contracts for new weapons zoom ahead, with Congress set to approve billions in new funding this year...
Right now, the United States spends about $54 billion each year on nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. President Obama has pledged to increase the budgets by about $2 billion a year for new bomb factories, plus spend about $12 billion more per year over the next decade to develop a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, submarines and bombers...
As long as nuclear weapons exist, we will need some to deter nuclear threats from others. But do we need to duplicate the entire nuclear triad for another 50 years?
American cannot and should not afford a repeat, but yet our out-of-control military spending is leading the U.S. into a bottomless budgetary hole.
The United States has more than 1,000 U.S. military bases spread out around the world. We have at least 1,180 bases was the number Nick Turse, an investigative journalist, was able to confim as of January 2011. "Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure," Turse added. The U.S. has "an empire of bases so large and shadowy that no one — not even at the Pentagon — really knows its full size and scope."
The cost of this "empire of bases" isn't cheap either. Turse quotes Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Dorothy Robyn as explaining the costs:
In 2010, according to Robyn, military construction and housing costs at all U.S. bases ran to $23.2 billion. An additional $14.6 billion was needed for maintenance, repair, and recapitalization. To power its facilities, according to 2009 figures, the Pentagon spent $3.8 billion. And that likely doesn’t even scratch the surface of America’s baseworld in terms of its full economic cost...
Indeed, toward the end of 2010, the White House's bipartisan deficit commission... suggested cutting U.S. garrisons in Europe and Asia by one-third, which would, in their estimation, save about $8.5 billion in 2015.
Downsizing the American empire would be a good start, but $8.5 billion in savings is not enough. The Center for American Progress released a report this month, "A Return to Responsibility" (pdf), advocating that Congress and the Obama administration look to their predcessors to reign in out-of-control defense spending.
Total U.S. defense spending (in inflation-adjusted dollars) increased so much over the past decade that it reached levels not seen since World War II when the United States had 12 million people under arms and waged wars on three continents...
The baseline budget, which does not include funding for Iraq or Afghanistan, has grown in real terms for an unprecedented 13 straight years. It is now $100 billion more than what the nation spent on average during the Cold War. When war funding is added, we are now spending about $250 billion more per year than during the Cold War. This ballooning defense budget played a significant role in turning the budget surplus projected a decade ago into a massive deficit.
Source: Center for American Progress, A Return to Responsibility (pdf)
According to the CAP report, America could "cut $100 billion in defense spending annually and still keep our military budget at the Reagan administration’s peak Cold War levels". But, even if Congress and the Obama administration were to be as bold to lead us back to Reagan-era level of insanity, America would still over the defense spending threshold that President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address in 1961, more than 50 years ago.
As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
Our national insecurity feeds our many wars — to the "War on Drugs" to the "War on Terror", each dollar we spend on war robs us of our future. Nearly eight years earlier, Eisenhower explained how defense spending was "theft" in "The Chance for Peace":
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
The men and women we elected have choices to make. They can continue to steal from those who can least afford it, or they can downsize their empire. Alternatively, they can tax the rich, those Americans who benefit the most from having an empire and endless wars.
If Congress and the president do nothing, the budget will be balanced in 8 years. But, they seem determined to tinker. So what will they choose? Where will they plunder? Necessary cuts to defense or whimsical cuts to the safety net?