by hilzoy
From the Washington Post:
"Determined to banish their old tax-and-spend image, Democrats want to shrink the federal deficit, preserve tax cuts for the middle class and challenge the president to raise money for the Iraq war when they take control of Congress next week. But it won't be easy.
The incoming Democratic chairmen of the House and Senate Budget committees said they plan to honor a campaign promise to devote billions of additional dollars a year to homeland security and education. And they reiterated a commitment not to cut off funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But with the costs of those military operations rising and President Bush considering an expansion of forces, the incoming chairmen, Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.) and Sen. Kent Conrad (N.D.), said they will have little room in their budget blueprints for significant new domestic spending, such as closing a much-criticized gap in the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit that forces millions of seniors to pay 100 percent of drug costs for a few weeks or months each year. (...)
Spratt and Conrad said they would aim to balance the budget by 2012, a goal that could anger liberal Democrats eager for new spending on domestic programs and conservative Republicans determined to preserve the tax cuts passed during Bush's first term. But it also could establish the Democrats as able stewards of the nation's treasury, political analysts said, giving the party's presidential candidates an important accomplishment for the 2008 campaign.
"In terms of practical politics, the reality is this: We have to be on good behavior so we have a chance to win the presidency," said Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition, a group of conservative House Democrats whose ranks swelled to 44 in the November elections. "We have a chance now of having a new Democratic Party that supports the middle class and has middle-class priorities at heart."
Republicans and budget experts say they doubt Democrats can simultaneously cut the deficit and meet their spending goals, especially given GOP opposition to higher taxes. Bush's top budget advisers said last week that they see no need to increase taxes to pay for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are expected to cost $170 billion this year, up from $120 billion in fiscal 2006."
Plainly, the incoming chairs of the House and Senate budget committees disagree with Paul Krugman, not to mention me. Equally plainly, "Bush's top budget advisers", who say that we don't need to raise taxes to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, have learned nothing from the administration's six years' experience in fiscal insanity.
I have one suggestion to help us balance the budget: don't go along with Bush's plan to increase the size of the Army and Marines. I am not an expert on the military, so I am more than usually open to the idea that I am wrong, but as I understand it, increasing the size of the military would not make any more troops available for around two years (the time it would take to recruit and train them.) If we were planning an open-ended commitment in Iraq, with our present level of troops continuing for the indefinite future, it would make sense to increase the size of the Army and Marines, just as it would have made sense to start adding more troops two (or more) years ago.
However, I hope we don't have any such plans, and I would oppose doing anything that would place more military resources at this President's disposal. So the justification for increasing the size of the Army and the Marines would have to rest on our future military needs.
We do not need more troops in order to defend the territory of the United States, since there is no real prospect that we will be invaded by any other country, and defending against terrorist attacks or missile strikes does not involve large numbers of ground troops. We do not need more troops in order to inflict very serious damage on any country that harms us -- we have more than enough military resources for that as it is, and we will have still more once we extricate ourselves from Iraq and begin the process of rebuilding and reequipping our army. We do not need more troops in order to respond to a pretty broad range of humanitarian catastrophes -- if we were not in Iraq, we would have more than enough troops to stop the violence in Darfur, for instance.
If we need more troops, the reason would have to be: for some future war of choice involving the invasion of another country. We would, for instance, need more troops than we now have if we wanted to invade Iran or North Korea, and to do so without the assistance of other countries.
As in the case of fiscal policy, I see no reason whatsoever to believe that the political and intellectual leadership of the Republican party has learned from its mistakes over the last six years. Specifically, there are large chunks of this administration, and of its intellectual enablers, who seem to think that the proper response to any country we have serious problems with is to invade it, and who have been making noises for a while now about invading Iran. They do not seem to have so much as begun to appreciate any of the foreign policy lessons of the last six years: the possibility of containment, the value of diplomacy, the dangers of taking down governments without any real idea of what will happen next, the unpredictability of war and the irresponsibility of going to war except as a last resort, and so forth.
Until the leadership of the Republican party shows some signs of having learned something from their failure in Iraq, I think that it would be a mistake to provide them with the means to invade other countries without international support. So I would oppose increasing the size of the Army and Marines even if it came cost-free.
But, of course, it doesn't. From the NYT (h/t Matt Yglesias):
"Pentagon civilian officials and military officers said that few were envisioning a large, rapid growth that would require the Army to dust off emergency mobilization plans for reopening bases or drawing in National Guard equipment.
Instead, civilian and military officials said, they are drawing up tentative proposals that would make permanent the 30,000-troop temporary increase approved by Congress after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and then add 30,000 more troops to the Army over the next five years, resulting in an active-duty Army with 542,400 soldiers by 2012.
Expanding the nation’s ground forces is expensive; every 10,000 new soldiers add about $1.2 billion in personnel costs to the Pentagon’s annual budget. On top of that, equipment for 10,000 new troops would cost an additional $2 billion, according to Army statistics."
So: 60,000 new troops at a total cost of $3.2 billion for every 10,000 new troops: that means $19.2 billion dollars a year for this proposal. (If the $2 billion for equipment is a one-time cost, then it would be $12 billion up front and $7.2 billion a year, plus maintenance and replacements for the new equipment.) All this to provide our government with the resources it needs to undertake ill-advised military adventures, at a time when one party has shown itself to be completely unworthy of being trusted with that responsibility.
I think not. This time, I'll opt for fiscal discipline.
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