"Democrats, meanwhile, have been trying to exploit the Republican rift by asserting that Mr.Bush's tax cut might weaken the military.
"We got no help from the administration to try to have a more balanced approach toward cutting taxes and providing for defense," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democrat from New York not known as a proponent of military spending, said in a hearing last week."
If that is the Democrats case against tax cuts (which in fact are objectively economically necessary now - just not in the Bush form), then I'd recommend being in favor of even Bush's regressive tax cuts in order to weaken the US military. Alas, if only it were so... in reality we'd get another dose of Reagans' Keynesian militarism if Our Good Lords thought it necessary.
No tax reduction _and_ no military reduction is truly the worst of both evils. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ JUL 26, 2001
Military Budget Creates Rift in G.O.P.
WASHINGTON, July 25 — The debate
over Pentagon spending has exposed a deep rift within the Republican Party's conservative wing, pitting supporters of tax cuts and smaller government against military hawks who contend that President Bush is shortchanging the armed forces.
The struggle is being played out in Congress, editorial pages and veterans groups, as supporters of a military buildup have complained bitterly that the Pentagon seems to be taking a back seat to tax cuts and spending on education and health care when it comes to White House priorities.
Though the fight is over money, it also reflects a broader trend in the Republican Party, where advocates of a muscular military contend that they are losing influence to economic conservatives who say the idea of reining in government ought to apply to the Pentagon as well.
While President Ronald Reagan was able to hold these competing strands together during the cold war by cutting taxes and raising military spending, the demise of the Soviet Union and the passage of Mr. Bush's $1.3 trillion tax cut have combined to reveal the fault lines once again.
What seems particularly dismaying to those hawkish critics is that Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney vowed in last year's campaign to restore troop morale and replace aging weapons systems, repeatedly proclaiming "help is on the way" to pro-military audiences across the country.
While Mr. Bush has proposed a 7 percent increase in military spending, many Pentagon officials and their supporters in Congress had been counting on twice that amount to pay for new ships, fighter jets and artillery weapons. Instead, most of the president's proposed $32 billion increase over the last Clinton budget is intended for basic needs like health care, spare parts and base improvements.
"We came in to rebuild national security, with an administration that I think wants to rebuild national security, at a time when you have a relative prosperity and a budgetary surplus," Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said in a recent hearing. "And all of a sudden, we find ourselves making tortured statements to each other and deploring on both sides of this table today the shortfall in important military resources. That's sad, I think."
Those sentiments were amplified last week in a scathing editorial in The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, in which William Kristol, the editor, and Robert Kagan, a columnist, accused Mr. Bush of "shorting the military." They even urged Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, to resign in protest of "the impending evisceration of the American military."
"If the president does not reverse course now, he may go down in history as the man who let American military power atrophy and America's post-cold-war pre-eminence to slip away — the president who fiddled with tax cuts while the military burned," said the editorial, in the magazine's July 23 issue.
Representative Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania who sits on the Armed Services Committee, said many Republicans privately agreed with The Standard's views.
"I don't think he's doing enough to sensitize the American people as to what the real needs of the military are," Mr. Weldon said of President Bush. "We knew the train wreck was coming for the last six years."
But these hawkish critics have themselves come under fire from economic conservatives who argue that there is little political support for a huge increase in military spending. The president was right to focus first on economic issues and tax cuts, they contend, even if those cuts have drastically reduced the surplus money available for weapons programs in coming years.
The economic conservatives also praise Mr. Rumsfeld's efforts to review and revamp the nation's war- fighting strategies, looking for savings along the way before blindly demanding a huge budget increase. And they have accused the hawks of wanting to bloat the proposed $329 billion Pentagon budget with pork- barrel projects.
"There's no grass-roots demand for dramatically increasing defense spending," said Grover G. Norquist, a prominent conservative strategist who heads Americans for Tax Reform. "What Bush promised on the campaign was to rethink the demands on the military and have national missile defense. He's doing what he promised. It's dishonest for people to claim he was going to shower money on them without accountability."
Several conservative analysts argued that the world had changed from when Mr. Reagan sharply raised military spending and deeply cut taxes, driving up the federal deficit. Then, the cold war was at its peak, and deficit spending was considered the norm. Today, the Soviet Union is gone, even liberal Democrats promote balanced budgets and the pro-military wing of the Republican Party has lost influence.
"This is not a terribly hawkish world," said James Pinkerton, a conservative writer who worked in the administration of Mr. Bush's father. "There's a need for a reality check."
Some hawkish Republicans like Senator John McCain of Arizona and Mr. Weldon said they would have been willing to accept a smaller tax cut if the money had been dedicated to the armed services. But there now seems to be little appetite among the hawks for scaling back the tax cut, as Democrats have urged.
But many conservatives who agree with Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld's step-by-step approach to modernizing the services also acknowledge widespread disenchantment among conservatives regarding the size of the Pentagon budget.
"You can't find a whole lot of people who are happy at this point," said Jack Spencer, a military analyst with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy group.
Democrats, meanwhile, have been trying to exploit the Republican rift by asserting that Mr. Bush's tax cut might weaken the military.
"We got no help from the administration to try to have a more balanced approach toward cutting taxes and providing for defense," Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democrat from New York not known as a proponent of military spending, said in a hearing last week.
Even Mr. Rumsfeld, in defending the president, has acknowledged that the military is not spending enough to modernize. Government officials say Mr. Rumsfeld had sought as much as $40 billion in additional money for 2002.
"It is not possible to repair the damage of year after year after year of underfunding" in one year, he told reporters recently. "And the president has any number of factors to take into consideration in fashioning his overall budget."
Disenchantment with the size of the budget has spread to veterans groups, which constitute a small but influential segment of the Republican base. Leaders of several groups have warned that the White House seems bent on paying for missile defense and other costly weapons by cutting conventional forces.
"There's a lot of anxiety in the services," said Ted Stroup, a retired lieutenant general and the vice president of the Association of the United States Army. "Since it doesn't appear that the money will be there, they may be told to cut internally."
The problem, the military hawks say, is that the spending picture will probably remain bleak for several years as the surplus shrinks, pitting military spending against popular education and health care programs for years to come.
"The people are saying, `We want tax cuts, we want education, we want a prescription drug program,' " Mr. Weldon said. "They aren't saying, `We want more defense.' "