Cut the military budget FIRST!

 If you don't know about the website Just Foreign Policy, you need to--  if you're sick of the 30 second sound bites that don't really tell you anything about U.S. foreign and military budget, then this is a site that reports objectively on issues progressives care about.  I subscribe to a daily newsletter that starts with a summary and follows with more in-depth reporting if you have time. 


 Here's two tidbits from today's summary.  So it would be better to cut Social Security and Medicaid than the military budget?

 1) Defense Secretary Panetta effectively told Congress to raise taxes and cut Social Security and Medicare before taking another swipe at the Pentagon budget beyond defense cuts already called for in the [first round of] the debt-ceiling deal, the New York Times reports. Panetta took the position that the joint committee created by the debt ceiling legislation should make no further defense cuts. The White House, however, has not ruled out further defense reductions. The committee, to be composed of six Democrats and six Republicans, would also be unlikely to take them off the table, the New York Times notes.

2) Also reporting on Panetta's statement that Congress should cut Social Security and Medicare and raise taxes rather than further cut the military budget, the Washington Post notes that defense spending represents about half of the federal government's discretionary spending, and the military's budget has increased by more than 70 percent since 2001. Although the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the Pentagon upward of $1 trillion, nearly half of the growth in defense spending in the past decade has been unrelated to the wars.

Photo from Brave New Worlds photostream at Flickr.

I solved the deficit!!

Congress is  headed for the biggest gridlock in decades, and there's absolutely no forward momentum to grow the economy and get folks back to work.  Yet somehow, the budget deficit has come to be seen as the biggest problem facing this country, and that's an impossible task, right?

Today's New York Times has an interactive feature that allows the reader to take a stab at solving the budget deficit.  Try it here.  And then if you want to see how I solved the deficit, you can go here.