Why don’t deficit hawks care about the cost of military adventurism?
▻http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-johnson-deficit-welfare-military-20170626-story.html
In the Democratic primary debates and in press conferences, Sen. Bernie Sanders was grilled on “how he would pay” for his free college and healthcare plans over and over again. Putatively liberal publications including the New Yorker and Vox decried Sanders’ “vague and unrealistic” price projections. But nobody asked his challenger, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, how she would pay for the “no-fly zone” in Syria she championed that, according to the Pentagon, would require at least 70,000 servicemen and dozens of aircraft.
Defense budgets and those that pad them operate in an alternate universe where military spending, somehow, isn’t spending.
Similarly in the presidential debates, billionaire Pete Peterson’s pro-Social Security privatization group, the “bipartisan” Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, was mentioned twice by the moderators (that’s twice more than climate change) in the context of deficits and the alleged impending insolvency of Social Security. Yet none of the 178 mentions of Russia, 71 mentions of Syria, or 67 mentions of Iran had anything to do with costs to the U.S. Treasury.
