Big Eyes, Small Stomach

"Fiscal questions trump defense in a way they never would have after 9/11. But the war in Iraq is over. Troops are coming home from Afghanistan, and we want to secure the cuts." Representative Tom Cole, (R- Oklahoma)

The sequester, a completely man-made national disaster, is the symptom and not the cause. When I was a little boy and mega-hungry, heaping mounds more than my tiny stomach could hold on to my plate, my mother would admonish, “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.” Governor Bobby Jindal may think that that his own Republicans are the “stupid party,” but Americans and their elected representatives from both parties continuously vote for policies and programs that don’t work, they don’t need and that we cannot afford. We are the “stupid country.”

Get tough on crime? Undocumented aliens? Great, the United States has about five percent of the world’s population but twenty-five percent of the world’s incarcerated prisoners. Why are we so completely out of line with normal? We have more crimes and longer sentences, horrifically expensive death penalty cases that wrap up millions of dollars for appeals and extra security per case. Half the cases are drug-related. There isn’t a criminal with weapons on his/her mind who cannot score a legally-acquired gun, from someone. Guns are absolutely everywhere, and in gun shows, private sellers in numerous states can sell to anyone without a background check. Common sense, anyone?

Almost nothing in our overtaxed, over-crowded criminal justice system is working anywhere. We need to decriminalize a whole pile of drug-related crimes, reduce the number of guns in the country, vastly reduce sentences, repeal the death penalty (if only for purely fiscal reasons) and revisit plea bargains and overlapping multiple criminal penalties for the essentially the same crime. We cannot afford anything else!

We have exceptionally generous government pension benefits, because public unions have extraordinary clout at the polls and in supporting candidates with hard dollar contributions. With trillions of dollars of such unfunded pension benefits, it’s pretty clear that defaults and Chapter 9 (municipal) bankruptcies are looming in numbers that we really need to worry about. We need to create a new short-of-full-bankruptcy remedy for pension plans that cannot afford to pay benefits created in another era, one that balances retirees’ interests with local governments’ ability to fund.

And while we cannot abandon our elderly and slash their benefits to meet our other “stupid” needs, we need to address that Americans are in fact living longer and (for those with jobs) retiring later. If nothing else, Social Security and Medicare for the elderly should slowly phase in older age requirements to reflect these realities. Even with the Affordable Care Act, watered down by a Congress hell-bent on protecting private industry, our medical costs in general are the highest in the world, eclipsing those in economies where the cost of living is higher than here (e.g., Switzerland), because our government protects pharmaceutical and healthcare insurance companies, supports expensive over-care under medical malpractice prevention strategies without the kinds of government control and competition that make healthcare universal in most of the rest of the first world… at substantially lower overall costs than what we pay for a failed privately-controlled system.

And like Representative Cole’s quote stated above, the nation’s entire approach to national defense requires ground-up re-think. We have ten active carrier fleets, one under construction and two in reserve with 3,700 planes. True pressure from the sequester is taking some of those ships off line, but why are we in every ocean in the world with a task force capable of fighting an entire war by itself? Our Air Force has about 4,500 planes, 450 ICBMs and 63 satellites. I could go on, but with capabilities that no other nation has, we are constantly being asked by our allies for tactical support in their global enforcement efforts that they cannot meet without our help.

So we get embroiled in a rather significant number of conflicts, which, when added to our shoot first and ask questions later proclivity that resulted in three major unwinnable wars (Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan), put the United States at the top of the “designated bully” hill that makes most of the rest of the world resent us even if they need us. As the king of that hill, we are also the test of manhood for the terrorists-du-jour, necessitating our Homeland Security expenditures that are handled in other less expansive ways by every other nation in the world.

When someone does us harm, blowing up their infrastructure and inflicting punishing blows on their military isn’t enough; we seem to need to send boots on the ground to occupy their land, often for many, many years. Why? What’s in it for us? Protecting oil? Venezuela hates us. We hate them. We buy their oil. They sell it to us. Please explain to me why the United States has to spend 41% of the total military expenditure on earth to be safe? Doesn’t it just make us a juicy target? All this while cutting our educational budget, the key to future earning ability, and letting our infrastructure rot away until some natural disaster multiples the net costs?

The sad reality is that we are acting like a once-wealthy billionaire who lost his or her fortune in a market crash trying to live at the same standard of living as when the money flowed. We still spend the way we always have. The rich are still taxed at rates that are lower than the general population. We don’t want to alter our lifestyles a whit. And while we cannot suddenly slash our spending in the absence of consumer demand without slamming the country back into recession, we can phase in common sense in our fiscal policies. Austerity European Union style is a joke that has failed as the global reactions to recent elections in Italy reflect. It’s time to deal with the post-recession United States as it really is… not as it once was.

I’m Peter Dekom, and left, right and center need a really healthy dose of common sense!