For the past year we have been hearing from conservatives and others about the need to cut public spending, the federal deficit is out of control and our children and grandchildren will have to bear the cost and the country will go bankrupt. This appears to be a new call from the right, and was never heard during the years of the last administration when taxes were cut for the wealthy while two unpopular wars were being waged with mounting costs. President Bush signed into law a prescription drug bill that cost taxpayers more than the administration “estimated,” along with a costly No Child Left Behind bill that allowed the government to meddle in locally run public schools on a massive scale. scale.

These programs were initiated by the Bush administration to placate the left and authenticate President Bush’s campaign promise of a compassionate conservative. The Bush administration started two wars, with the most military spending in the country’s history, taking the $236 billion surplus, spending it in the first year, and turning it into a $407 billion deficit by the time President Obama took office. The charge.

While we are cutting government budgets at all levels, cutting programs for education, children, the poor and the elderly, no one is talking about cutting the defense budget. In fact, defense spending has increased since 2009 by between $40 billion and $50 billion. The defense budget for 2010 is $663.8 billion, $16 billion more than President Obama had requested. And there could be an additional $40 or $50 billion added by spring 2010 for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing the total to between $880 billion and $1.03 trillion. But nobody is outraged by these numbers, at least not conservatives. John McCain, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and others, including some Democrats, support unusual military spending.

Why then, when US military spending comprises 54% of our federal budget, adds up to more than the other fifteen industrialized nations combined, twelve of these nations of our allies, do we not seek to reduce this pool of wasteful money and spending? It is detracting from domestic spending and, in fact, making us less safe. That Americans don’t have affordable health care, jobs, can’t stay in their homes, isn’t that national security, and isn’t that less safe as a people?

Budget deficits began to explode under the watch of Ronald Reagan, who lowered the tax rate on the wealthiest Americans from seventy percent to thirty-eight percent, saying at the time that this would spur investment, create more jobs for the lower class. average and the economy. it would skyrocket with new levels of production and prosperity. But history has shown that supply-side economics, Reagan’s trickle-down theory, doesn’t work. Reagan’s policies produced the deepest recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment peaked at 10.8% in December 1982. And we’ve had a deficit ever since, until the Clinton administration, when President Clinton reversed Reagan’s tax policy, raising taxes on the wealthy and cutting them on the class. worker and a half, creating a budget surplus. and the longest sustained economic recovery in our nation’s history. This allowed the government to begin paying off the debt initiated by President Reagan. This rules out the old theory that Democrats tax and spend.

President Reagan said at the time that the potholes are not important and set out to cut domestic spending while increasing military spending by 43 percent when he left office in 1989. In fact, he increased the military budget . for much more than it was able to cut domestic spending. Tens of thousands more soldiers were employed along with more weapons and equipment and intelligence increased. He launched the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) commonly known as Star Wars. The idea at the time was that by putting defenses in outer space, the United Nations ABM (Anti Ballistic Missile) treaty could be circumvented. In 1985, after billions had been spent with minimal results, SDI was closed.

Where, then, could we make cuts and still keep our citizens safe? We could think about closing some of the 737 overseas military bases that employ more than 2.5 million US personnel. An estimated value of these bases by the Department of Defense in 2005 was $658.1 billion.

Of course, when we address this in countries like Germany, they resist the idea, saying that closing the bases in their country would ruin the economies of the cities where these bases are located. Are we willing to invest millions of dollars in foreign economies while our economy languishes?

Another area to cut would be nuclear warheads, which President Obama is already considering. We maintain a current stockpile of 9,960 intact warheads, of which 5,735 are considered active or operational. The cost of maintaining them, according to the Los Angeles Times, was 52.4 billion in 2008. How many pumps do we need? The cost of storing, maintaining and transporting these weapons is high. In fact, the whole idea of ​​nuclear weapons is to prevent our enemies from dropping one or more on us. And we must remember that we are the only country in the world that has used nuclear bombs during war.