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Keeping Carlucci at the Pentagon might not exactly be doing him a favor. Over the next five years, he figures, the Pentagon will have to slash appropriations by $200 billion to $300 billion below the amounts it had planned to spend. A $300 billion cut is roughly equivalent to the current year's total military outlays, from missiles to mouthwash, battleships to boots. And that amount is the optimistic estimate. It assumes that Congress will heed Carlucci's request to increase the Pentagon's budget each year by a steady 2% above the rate of inflation. While George Bush supports...
...that the Pentagon will be lucky to get even that much. Many members of Congress, searching for ways to cut the overall budget deficit, are in no mood to give the military any increase. According to Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee, the slash in Pentagon budget authority over the next five years is likely to be "closer to $422 billion" than to Carlucci's figures...
Most critics agree with Gordon Adams, director of the Washington-based Defense Budget Project, that these weapons probably can be bought "only at the price of a drastic cut in the size of the U.S. armed forces or a debilitating slash in spending for readiness" (training, ammunition, spare parts). The whole contretemps raises a harrowing but unavoidable question: Can the U.S. afford to pay for the defense it needs -- and just how much does it need anyway? In his best-selling book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Historian Paul Kennedy points out that such dominant nations...
...much of the country with its economic gains, but its irresponsible fiscal policy managed to mortgage the entire country's economic strength and future. Reaganomics is not even a shining success by supply-side standards--the president has all but ignored his campaign promises to balance the budget and slash government spending. The recent period of economic growth has been tempered by the deepest recession since the Great Depression, the panic on Wall Street, the rise of the "twin towers" (the budget and trade deficits) and a trillion dollar jump in the national debt...
...campaign trail, Bush likes to allude to the successes of the "Reagan-Bush" administration. But the public will be reviewing the Reagan-Bush failures as well. George Bush can promise to be the "education president." But the voters won't forget that Reagan-Bush attempted to slash education spending. He can talk about compassion, but most voters will remember who was slashing food stamp programs during the 1981 - 1983 recession. The Vice President can promise to bring integrity back to Washington, but he can't hide the fact that he stood behind Meese, Deaver, Nofziger, McFarlane, North, and Reagan...