A Pricey Foreign Policy
My latest at The Daily Beast is a rare foray into foreign affairs — and specifically grapples with the amount of money the United States spends on its defense. Is it sustainable? Whether the answer is yes or no, I call for conservatives to be as skeptical about government waste in foreign affairs as they are in domestic spending.
Well, I’m not a conservative, but I’ll help you out — close all overseas military bases and find a way to end both wars. It might take a five year transition but we should begin the process of closing all bases immediately. I’ve been saying this about the bases for at least 7 years.
Then, go through the entire military budget and cut everything which is not essential. Once we’ve found the right level of expenditures to protect us from foreign invasion, then keep it, unless periodic reviews show we cut more, or if we need to increase it due to changing situations.
We don’t need a big military spread out across the globe — we need a smart, efficient, technologically proficient military.
— mike farmer · Sep 29, 10:35 PM · #
I’ve thought about this problem before, and while it seems like a good way to reduce the budget, I often wonder if military spending is good way to give a huge number of smart engineers money (how responsible is the process of building and design military equipment for improving the quality of our technology over the past 50 years).
So I’d like to bring up one other possibility, maybe instead of eliminating the resource spent on the military, we redirect it to a goal that would have more beneficial effects: for example, a huge civili engineer core that would be responsible for building a bunch of nuclear plants accross the country, or vastly increase funding to NASA, or a huge science core that would work on a set of large scale projects.
Just an idea to facilitate discussion…
— josh · Oct 1, 10:51 PM · #