Can the U.S. Ever Cut Military Spending?

If Social Security is the third rail of American politics, then military spending must be the fourth, fifth and sixth. Because as President Obama moves forward with big plans to freeze spending on federal programs for up to three years, one thing he's not talking about freezing or cutting is military spending. In fact, for next year, Department of Defense spending will increase at least seven percent, to the point where the the U.S. will spend more on military spending than almost all of the rest of the world. Combined.

Forget Head Start or farm subsidies. The Pentagon needs more pens.

So much for Democrats being the party that is weak on national security. In fact, Obama's military budget for next year is going to dwarf that of President Reagan, who spent most of the 1980s trying to make the U.S. Navy bloated with navy ships, and trying to launch a Star Wars program that would have militarized outer space to keep America safe from Commies. Yup, Obama's military budget will eclipse $573 billion next year (some say it could go higher than $650 billion!), giving the Pentagon a record-setting budget with which to overspend and waste.

Sixty years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower closed out his presidency by issuing a warning about the military industrial complex. What he didn't explicitly say, although easily alluded to, was that the U.S. was heading for the day when military spending would be so sacrosanct, there'd be no turning back. Looks like those days have come.

Glenn Greenwald nails this point home today, pointing out that while the U.S. economy is on rocky ground, defense spending has thrived like a blister in the sun.

"Even as the U.S. sunk under increasingly crippling levels of debt over the last decade, defense spending rose steadily, sometimes precipitously.  That explosion occurred even as overall military spending in the rest of the world decreased, thus expanding the already-vast gap between our expenditures and the world's," Greenwald wrote.

And that's a trend that's likely to continue. Not taking into account any other wars that pop up around the universe, the U.S. is scheduled to spend well over $600 billion per year on military spending until 2028. By then, Miley Cyrus will be 46 years old ... and what will the state of our education programs, nutrition programs, air traffic control programs, and national parks (all of which will see spending freezes or cuts under Obama's plan) be? Well, probably somewhere between doomed and desecrated.

In the end, President Obama may have just confirmed something that's been a hard fact since the days of Eisenhower -- as a country, no matter who's in charge, we're just not responsible enough to have an adult conversation about defense spending. Maybe it's an inside the Beltway curse, but for whatever reason, when it comes to talking about military budgets, politicians in Washington only see one direction: more, more and more.

Photo credit: U.S. Army