What should Obama do?
 

Boehner: Help stop defense cuts - Seung Min Kim - POLITICO.com

Speaker John Boehner wants President Barack Obama to jump in and prevent the Pentagon from getting slammed with hundreds of billions in budget cuts set to go into effect thanks to the failure of the deficit supercommittee.

Saying “no one really wants to go there” on the automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs, Boehner said Obama has the responsibility to work with lawmakers to find a way around these automatic cuts to defense spending.

“He’s the commander –in-chief,” Boehner told reporters Thursday. “He knows what those cuts mean to the military and so I frankly believe that Congress still must work with the president to find a solution to our long-term debt.”

Re: What should Obama do?
 

Grant the DoD the opportunity to justify their budget. Of course, that requires a cohesive, and coherent, strategic vision for the next twenty years (i.e. beyond the election cycle).

Re: What should Obama do?
 

They are only talking about 600B over 10 years ie 60B per year, this is not important. Window dressing is all this is.

Cut it now.After Obama is defeated cut another 9 B, as the Tea Party budget recommends. Boehner is a moron, Obama and Reid are worse.

Re: What should Obama do?
 

What should he do meaning President Obama (i.e., what's best for the nation) or candidate Obama (what's best for his re-election)? Sadly, I don't think the 2 are the same.

Re: What should Obama do?
 

We should do what the Pentagon itself recommends we do. I have no problem with cutting military spending in accordance with what the Pentagon recommends.

But the biggest problems with out of control military spending is every time the Pentagon recommends we cut a program, Congressman Smith from the district that manufactures that plane or ship or sub or engine or whatever fights the cut.

Re: What should Obama do?
 

I know what it should mean:

Withdraw from and close bases in Japan, Germany, England, and every other country that doesn't use the initials U.S.A.

Barry Goldwater ain't walking through that door any time soon. The Pentagon is a welfare project. Their operation has less to do with the military than it does with paying the contractors.

Re: What should Obama do?
 

Yes. The single largest discretionary spending program in the known universe should be asked to write its own ticket.

They will naturally cut their own budget by billions.

That is how we can scale down big government... we can just ask each cabinet level department how much they need... and then when they say, we should say "really?" like really skeptically. Then if they still say yes, well, they must really need that much.

The way you do it is you say, give me your budget submission, and make your total $X, or I'll tell you to do it again. The time for that approach was when the '13 budget submissions went up. The '12 submissions are way past a year old now. And as we all know, they're all exercises in futility because congress is offline.

The Pentagon's budget doubled in the last decade. They're also being asked to do a lot more.

So two things, ask them to do less (check, in terms of Iraq winding down,) and begin reversing the explosion in military budget growth of the last decade.

Politically, it'll be interesting. Doing the right thing might involve vetoing a military spending bill - that's where the rubber hits the road. It's where you're hitting much of the nation's knee cap with the tap hammer, to see whether the reflex has changed.

Watching & seeing.

PFnV