Friday, August 7, 2015

How Obama Shrank the Military

He’s used the budget sequester to accomplish what looks to have been his political goal from the start.
News last month of the U.S. Army’s decision to cut 40,000 active-duty soldiers, shrinking to 450,000 by 2017, drew fusillades inside the Beltway. Sen. John McCain assailed “another dangerous consequence of budget-driven strategy.” Adam Smith, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, fumed: “Sequestration and the Budget Control Act, which are responsible for slashing the defense budget, exist because the Republican Party held our economy hostage and threatened to default on our loans.”
Members of the U.S. Army’s First Infantry Division at 
Fort Riley, Kan., after returning from Iraq, 
Sept. 22, 2009. Photo: Orlin Wagner/AP
These sound bites might bewilder Americans unfamiliar with the details of sequestration. Explanation is in order.
To start at the beginning: In 2011 Democrats controlled the White House and Senate, but Republicans promising fiscal restraint had swept the 2010 elections and controlled the House. That set up an inevitable confrontation, which culminated in the summer of 2011.
The federal government was on track to blow through its debt ceiling—the maximum amount of borrowing permitted by law—in early August. The White House needed Congress to raise the limit. Republicans demanded spending cuts in exchange. It is true, then, that the Budget Control Act of 2011 resulted from Republicans’ use of the debt ceiling as a bargaining chip.
Democrats, however, had used the same tactic with the debt ceiling in 2006. Further, sequestration—compulsory spending caps that would take effect if the two sides failed to agree on an alternative plan to reduce the deficit—was first proposed by the Obama White House.
The allocation of half the sequestration cuts to defense, at a time when it accounted for only about 20% of spending, was also President Obama’s handiwork. In his memoir “Duty,” then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates writes that in spring 2011 the president promised that military cuts would amount to perhaps one dollar for every $10 of domestic cuts. But in subsequent negotiations, Mr. Obama stipulated that half of the $1.2 trillion in sequestration cuts come from defense.
The Budget Control Act passed in August 2011 with Republican support, a fact the White House’s defenders have been quick to point out. Some tea party Republicans were willing to slash military spending as part of large-scale budget reduction. But national security conservatives—including Mr. McCain, who voted “yes”—were convinced that the huge defense cuts would never take effect. The law set up a bipartisan “supercommittee” to make a responsible grand bargain, which would stay the sequestration ax.
By November 2011 it was clear the supercommittee had failed. Yet the sequestration cuts were not scheduled to take effect until 2013, giving the White House and Congress another year to overturn them. Throughout 2012 congressional hawks repeatedly offered legislation to do so. Mr. Obama promised to veto such legislation unless it included tax increases. Republicans said the supercommittee was charged only with identifying spending cuts, and hence it was disingenuous to hold a compromise hostage to new taxes.
Read the rest of the story HERE.

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