THE END OF THE US HEGEMON ….. By Dick Shriver

Each Thanksgiving I try to recite my own version of the first Thanksgiving (that is, if my family, who have all heard it, groan and let me get away with it). It goes something like this: “Over the previous and first winter of their existence in the US, many Pilgrims were half starved, sick or had died. Then, after the remarkable harvest in the summer of 1623, due in large measure to technical assistance provided by the Native American tribes, they had the celebratory feast we now know as Thanksgiving. Governor William Bradford made a speech at the feast. At the end of his address, and after giving thanks to God and the Indians, he said to the remaining 53 barely standing voyagers (out of the more than 100 who had begun the journey to America), ‘Now, let’s rise up and create the world’s greatest hegemon’”.

The US was not set up to become a hegemon, nor did it ever express or display any official desire to become a hegemon in the sense of controlling others. Serious Hegemaniacs require a great deal of government control over citizens’ daily lives along with, especially, an overbearing influence on foreign nations.

Our founders fought for guarantees that the US would not become a hegemon. The span of control of the federal government was carefully circumscribed by a fine Constitution. These principles were gradually eroded away by the cuts (but not in spending) of a thousand Congressional knives over the past two centuries, but especially since the Great Depression of the thirties. ….and even more especially since the start of the present century.

Meanwhile Russia has sought to become a hegemon since the 14^th century when the Mongols, weary of slaughtering and plundering, and lacking a long range plan, assimilated with, and largely subordinated themselves to, those they had conquered. Russia under the Tsars was every bit as aggressive territorially as the Soviets were during the twentieth century …. until August, 1991, when the world’s only true hegemon at the time came apart at the seams, yielding up 14 new independent states as well as freeing up some dozen countries in Eastern Europe.

Despite the dire predictions of many, the US, led by President George H. W. Bush, had no desire to gloat or take military or diplomatic advantage of the broken giant. The Cold War that had dominated world affairs for half a century just went away, exposing a whole different world that had been neglected, a world of famine, civil wars, atrocities, disease, and abject poverty.

What was left of the Russian hegemon at the end was a disciplined, well-paid, military-industrial complex. When the source of sustenance to this huge complex collapsed, and Moscow no longer sent money out to pay the military-industrial complex, the husk of a country that was left was that of basic consumer needs, and those that controlled them (largely women) began to prosper … food supplies, candy, bottled water, private transportation, and agriculture … all sectors of the economy whose vitality had been sapped by the Soviet system that put as much as 40 % of its GDP into defense spending. The Soviet military and its research laboratories and manufacturing facilities were alive and well, even prospering, right up until president Boris Yeltsin climbed atop one of his military tanks and declared the hegemon at an end.

The economic and social shock to the system was palpable … men who no longer had status, or who continued to preside over shells of companies that began to pay their workers in groats, vodka and very cheap wine, drank themselves into oblivion by lunchtime; many simply died early, reducing the average lifespan of Russians from 63 to 58 years in only five years, 1989 - 1994.

Now we have the decline of the American hegemon. Interestingly, the only major sector of the economy which is operating effectively today is also the US military … and to a decreasing extent the industrial complex that supplies it. Eisenhower warned us.

The consumer sector is on life support. Politicians decided we should no longer include food or gasoline when calculating inflation, as if these were no longer important factors to American families, and thus hiding and disguising warning signs of doom. The commanding heights of America’s economy … finance, housing, health, and energy …. have all been neutered by the intervention of big government. And so much for self regulation, especially of the financial industry where “True Grit” was replaced by “True Greed”.

Careers in public service are amply rewarded by early retirements and life-long health care and pensions thereafter, paid for by a declining segment of the population who continue to apply what remains of venture capital to fewer and fewer good ideas. 40 million people are on food stamps. The poverty line in the US is drawn at 20 to 50 times the average income of most of the people in the rest of the world. 50 million wage earners pay no taxes.

We are not sustainable.

We brought it on ourselves. The ideals of Horatio Alger are long gone from memory. Keynes’s “animal spirits” of investor optimism are about to sink beneath the surface for the third and final time. Adam Smith's "unseen hand" has been lopped off. The prescience of Alexis de Toqueville comes to haunt: "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury”.

The hubris of today's presidents and their cabinets. all too eager to write their own legacies while still in office, has replaced the humility, brilliance, patriotism, critical thinking and patriotism of a Harry Truman.

So what will be the result? A long-term decline of the US private sector, perhaps haltingly at first with an occasional victory by a pseudo conservative presidential candidate, an occasional up-tick in the financial markets supported mainly by memories of a glorious past, but with a steadily downward trend nonetheless until bloated government, obsolete entitlements, and a currency of declining value and importance, brings us to the same place as the Soviet Union in 1991.

The final sector to expire before the rise of an agrarian subsistence economy will be the world’s finest-ever military force, and then even our military, with signs of decline beginning to show even today, will be eclipsed. China, the world’s next hegemon, will miss us … as supplicant borrowers and as customers.

Many who survive will continue to give thanks on the last Thursday of each November.

Straws in the Wind By Thomas F. Berner

Item: I spent last weekend with friends. He is a retired police officer and she has just retired as an environmental scientist for a Midwestern city. She told me that she was glad to have retired because there has suddenly been a mass of regulations issued by the Environmental Protection Agency, none of which will do much for the environment, compliance with which will be very expensive and most of which have a mechanism allowing one to pay a fee and get an exemption.

Comment: It is that last “pay to not play” feature which should raise an eyebrow or two in the media, but doesn’t.

Item: The EPA has been wasting a lot of energy this year trying to get CO2 regulated as a pollutant. The operations of some municipalities and companies apparently cause an excess of it. Now CO2 is the equivalent of oxygen to all plants, so it is hardly a pollutant as we currently think of them. Animals breathe oxygen and breath out CO2 while plants breathe in CO2 and breathe out oxygen, a classic symbiotic relationship.

Comment: Assuming that the CO2 levels are high enough to worry about, shouldn’t the EPA just mandate the planting of trees to convert the CO2 to oxygen? Of course not. You’re thinking too rationally. The EPA wants all sorts of fees, fines and fiats which will clean nothing up but create a lot of jobs for lawyers.

Item: Meanwhile, in order to argue that climate warming is anthropogenic (i.e., caused by humans instead of occurring naturally), global warming alarmists have to confront paleoclimatology, the study of prior weather patterns. There is abundant evidence that the climate was a lot warmer than it is now. Deep under thick sheets of ice in central Greenland are a number of Norse farming villages. It’s a pretty good bet that humans weren’t responsible for THAT global warming. There weren’t that many of us and we certainly hadn’t invented the internal combustion engine then.
The response of the scientists has been less than honorable. First came the infamous “hockey stick graph” made famous by “An Inconvenient Truth,” the discredited “documentary” produced by Al Gore. In one paper, the global warming enthusiasts relied on the tree ring data of a single tree in Siberia, ignoring contrary data from all the other trees in the surrounding forest, a literal failure to see the forest for the tree. More important, there was a leak of 1000 emails and 3000 other documents – a total of 160 MB of data in computerspeak - from the Climatic Research Unit (the “CRU”) at the University of East Anglia, which The Daily Mail tells us plays “a leading role in compiling UN reports” and has many of the most prominent paleoclimatologists in the world. The University of East Anglia, as well as some of the authors, have acknowledged the accuracy of the leaks.

These documents show a disturbing willingness of leading scientists to destroy the lives of anyone who dissented from their ideology (their methods are too political to give them the dignity of calling their work “science”). They would threaten to withhold data from journals which published dissenting views, they would ruin the reputation of any scientist who published papers which didn’t tow their party line. Even The New York Times, always sycophantic towards leftist thinking, quoted Patrick J. Michaels, a prominent climatologist who was a victim of the CRU hit squad as saying “this shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways.”

Comment: Perhaps worse than the crime itself was the reaction. Even though global warming researchers, including many implicated in the fraud perpetrated by the CRU have received billions of dollars of government research money, no government entity has even bothered to investigate. Those academic entities who bothered to look into the issue seemed more intent to whitewash the issue than to deal with it seriously. And, of course, The New York Times spent most of the small space it devoted to the story tut-tutting that gentlemen don’t read other peoples’ mail. Berthold Brecht’s great play “Galileo” portrays an establishment so protective of the status quo that it is willing to block all dissenting opinions. That provides a perfect analogy to the state of the intellect in modern establishment America.

Item: Of course, there was something always a bit suspicious about a movement which pushes the Kyoto Treaty which imposed economically crippling restrictions on developed countries while exempting the world’s worst polluters in their entirety; a movement which tells us that the sky is falling even as it books annual conferences, on the taxpayers bill, to carbon footprint intensive destinations like Bali and Rio de Janeiro. It is common to find even moderate and normally sensible commentators who argue that since the scientists believe one thing, we are forbidden to disagree and must also ignore scientists with equal credentials who disagree. This is a movement that doesn’t search for the truth, but claims to have found it as a Revealed Truth and damns anyone who asks to look behind the curtain.

Comment: This is not, of course, a conspiracy. We are, rather, in one of those intellectual air pockets the world finds itself every once in a while in which discovery and innovation are a threat to the established order and any failure of policy results from our not believing hard enough – we all must clap loud enough to bring Tinkerbell back to life. There are four toxic intellectual flaws which have created the mess we’re in, not just environmentally, but in all forms of intellectual endeavor:

Stupidity – as Abe Lincoln said “it’s better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re dumb than to open it and prove it to them.” Although most believers of global warming have no knowledge of its source, they know that if they blame America, no one will fault them, whereas alternates will put you on the hot seat. There is, therefore, an incentive to tow the party line. Original thinking always involves some flaws in the argument, rightfully exposing one to criticism. Hiding in the pack with other believers of a flawed theory lets you escape responsibility for your own beliefs.

Arrogance – if you believe what everyone else believes, you can hide behind others even while you take credit for their ideas. This breeds arrogance and arrogance shuts down the innovative part of the intellect: you already know the truth, so there is nothing more to learn. Al Gore believes that he is so important to the environmental fate of the world that he is entitled to fly around the world on private jets despite the much higher carbon footprint than commercial air travel. This creates a lack of empathy for others that is startling. I met a former Secret Service Agent who was assigned to protect Mr. Gore when he was Vice President. One day, Mr. Gore was criticizing his son’s poor grades in front of the Agent and, pointing to the Agent, said “if you don’t get your grades up, you’ll end up just like this guy!”

Self-interest – not coincidently, Al Gore is the first environmental billionaire and those scientists who silence dissent do so because they count on billions of dollars in grants from governments, charities and people with more dollars than sense. There is a conflict which cripples rational thinking.

Self-hatred – you can never overlook the power of self-hatred, which usually takes the form of hatred for your culture and your heritage. The other day, I met a nice, conservative lady in church who told me very matter-of-factly that “before the white man came to America” (she was white herself, of English descent), rattlesnakes didn’t bite, that they would drop by Native American village and sort of hang out and the Native Americans would talk to them. Look around you and you’ll find this self-hatred to take many forms and to be found among all classes and races in the world (there were even a few Jews in the Nazi Party, which has to be the ultimate example of self-hatred). It is certainly evident in the environmental movement.

Comment: does this mean that global warming is a fraud? No, it does not. Although the data has an annoying habit of moving around a lot – it is constantly rising! no, says the same institution later, it has stayed at current levels since the late 90s; it has risen to a certain level, says someone, whoops! they say later, the data was off by 40% - and even though I am not a scientist, I am willing to attest that the weather SEEMS to be behaving differently than when I was a child. However, what is clear is that the toxic intellectual flaws I mention above have rendered much of the raw data and all of the hype dubious. The answer is not to write off the concept, but to find some honorable scientists to study the issue, real scientists, not just with degrees behind their name, but with the integrity to lead them where their research takes them.

Item: And it looks like this has already been done. The Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark has long argued that changes in the sun, such as sunspots, have caused the bulk of climate change in the world. In a project only recently finished, working under the auspices of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Dr. Svensmark and 63 scientists from 17 European and American institutes built a chamber which modeled the effect of the sun on the earth’s atmosphere and proved that cosmic rays control the atmosphere and that the suns magnetic fields control the amount of cosmic rays hitting the earth. This is a major turning point in the science of global warming, although we can expect powerful forces suffering from the four toxic intellectual flaws to be arrayed against it.

Sadly, you might include cowardice as a fifth intellectual flaw, a flaw which the Director General of CERN shares. It was the Director General who ordered Dr. Svensmark not to interpret the results or speak publicly about the project, not because there is anything wrong with the results, but because the results “would go immediately into the highly political arena of climate change debate.” As if that is a reason to suppress an important scientific breakthrough: we might further the progress of a debate and - apocalypse now! – actually change the premises on which our faulty knowledge is based!

When moral courage is lacking, the truth takes a longer time to break through.

Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net

Hard Power, Soft Power and No Power By Thomas F. Berner

The collapse of the Qaddafi Regime was heralded by the Left as a triumph of “soft power” which was somehow a vast improvement over the “hard power” we employed in Iraq. Just what soft power is was not well explained, although it seemed to boil down to “not Bush.” Although it was embarrassing to think that “leading from behind” is anyone’s idea of leadership, it certainly was refreshing to see the Europeans take the lead on a military venture.

One result of soft power is that we have no idea who will take over Libya. Oh, The New York Times is gah gah over the quality of the front men for the transitional party, but given the track record of The New York Times, that is more a cause of concern than comfort. There are reports that the CIA had a team with some of the rebels in Benghazi, but the CIA has shown itself all too often to be vulnerable to a peculiar form of xenophilia which makes them fall prey to the con jobs of fast talking foreigners.

One thing is clear: the current unity of the anti-Qaddafi crowd is already falling apart and that we have no influence over who will come out on top of the internecine battles to come. With no troops on the ground and with no visible role in liberating Libya, we will have to “lead from behind” again as the Europeans, who are practitioners of hard power even as they have gutted their own armies. They will get Libya’s oil and we will get the bill.

In truth, we have not practiced real “hard power” since the Spanish American War, when we took over Spain’s colonies as one of the fortunes of war. Since then we have only had versions of soft power, no matter how much blood and treasure we committed to a war. Hard power was the Soviet Union, dismantling East Germany’s industrial plant brick by brick and moving it to the USSR. Soft power was our building up West Germany, creating a formidable competitor to our own industry.

Today, as we scramble to abandon Iraq, a fragile but real democracy in the heart of the Middle East, we are committing to staying in Afghanistan until 2024 even though – or perhaps I should say precisely because – the United States has no national interest there and the current structure of government (a centralized state which is the opposite of what a decentralized tribal society needs) is fundamentally flawed.
The Arab Spring is already shaping up to be more momentous and less favorable to the West than we would like. The Egyptian Army is delaying elections, probably in an attempt to replace Mubarak with another dictator instead of a real election. The State Department has been begging Libya’s neighbors, apparently without much success, to police their borders to reduce the flood of arms that our “allies” in the war against Qaddafi are sending to Al Qaeda. Someone is launching sophisticated missiles at Israel from Egyptian territory. And this is just the beginning.

The Middle East will develop without much influence from us, but given our track record over the last fifty years, perhaps it is best that the Europeans take the lead on nation building. We used to be great at it. The Philippines today is a proud democracy and the US turned the warrior dictatorships of Japan and German into peace loving democracies. The brilliant reconstruction of Germany and Japan tend to be disregarded these days as critics claim that nation building there was easy, because they had been industrial economies, but those critics tend to forget that Japan thought its Emperor was God and was willing to commit mass suicide to protect him. Compared to that attitude, even the most fanatical Muslim country looks like a nascent democracy.

It is the US which has changed, not the rest of the human race. We took a curious collective shift in our mentality in the late 1950’s and one of the unexpected side effects was that we lost the knack for nation building. The splendid ability to make the rest of the world want to be more like us has disappeared. This may be because the world has developed alternative visions which we have been lax in countering. It may be because we have lost faith in our myths, always a sign of a declining culture. It may just be because we have reordered the way we do things to our detriment.

Whatever the underlying cause, one of the other symptoms of that sea change in America’s attitude can be found in the public’s attitude toward the U.S. Army. Not the other services, but the Army in particular. In my experience, even the most strident leftists usually have a soft spot for the Navy and the Air Force, as well as for the Marines and the elite units like the Navy SEALS and the Special Forces. It is the line Army, the average Americans converted into effective soldiers, that bears the brunt of the anti-military feelings. Even today, now that the Ivy League has lost their excuse to ban ROTC, they are falling all over themselves to create Navy ROTC units, not Army ROTC.

This is odd, because the Army has always been the most democratic of all of the services. It has always been easier in the Army than in the other services for an enlisted man to be promoted into the officer ranks. After the Civil War, the African American treated the Army as one of the best jobs available to their community and to this day, African Americans still speak proudly of their children “in the service.” The integration of the Army went a lot more smoothly than the integration of the Navy.

The Army’s democratic values were reflected in national politics. Until 1960 every President with a military record came from the Army. Since 1960, eleven candidates for President from the two major parties had Navy experience, six had an Air Force (or Air Corps) record, seven had no military service and only two had Army experience. Among those elected, JFK, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, Carter and the first George Bush were Navy veterans and Reagan and the second Bush had an Air Force record (Air Corps in the case of Reagan). Clinton and Obama have no military experience.

Why is this important? Because the basic fighting unit of the U.S. Army is the individual. In the Navy and the Air Force, it is a machine. There is a difference in attitude and in an organization’s approach to education, and structure if your most important unit is a ship or an airplane than if it is a human being. All of the elite units, of course, are based on highly trained individuals, but they are very small and very specialized individuals and their organizational structure is not a model for organizing a large number of people.

It is this democratic attitude – of individuals making up the fundamental building block of society – which we have lost. Politics today is a matter of constructing a coalition of power blocs – the Black community, the Unions, the evangelical Christians – big enough to get elected and assuming that everyone in those power blocs lack the individuality to think outside that bloc. National politics is more like the old fashioned urban machines of the late 19th Century than of the politics that won World War II. Not coincidently, nation building has been taken from the Army and given to a professional group of humanitarians, with dismal results.

Another reason this is important is because the Army has always borne the brunt of warfare. It is easy to be for war when you fly over foxholes rather than live in one and easier to be against war when you haven’t liberated any death camps. The loss of the Army as the primary service among the national political and business elites has meant that our decision making process has lost touch with reality.

One of the things that struck me most in my year in Afghanistan was the degree to which 24 year old infantry sergeants with high school educations were more sensitive to the local culture than Ivy League educated diplomats. It reminded me of Mark Twain’s dictum that the problem with schooling is that it interferes with your education.

And we as a country can only be the loser.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net

A Crisis of the Intellect by Thomas F. Berner

There is a respectable school of thought among historians of Ancient Rome that Rome failed, not because of the introduction of Christianity or the invasion of the barbarians, but by the restrictions of Roman education which stifled the intellectual flexibility of the leaders of the Roman Empire and prevented it from adjusting to new realities. The crisis and collapse occurred because the rigidities of its educational system carried over into the thinking of its educated elites.

We are facing such a crisis today. It is more than the mere economic crisis or the country’s loss of credibility in world affairs. It is a crisis without easy answers and certainly one that will not be alleviated merely by a change of personnel in the upper echelons of government. If we fail to address the crisis properly, it could prove to be fatal to everything we believe in as a country.

The crisis is one of the mind, a rigidity in thinking, a confusion of self interest with national interest with human interest and it all leads to the fatal instinct of arrogance, intolerance and a lack of empathy for competing views. It results from an inability to “think outside the box,” to reexamine old prejudices and chart a new future.

It is not a lack of brain power, it is a failure to question what you think, or want to know, is true and allow for the possibility that you might be mistaken. It is the unwillingness to examine years of learning and go back to square one to recheck your data. Even more destructive, it is to be so sure of yourself that anyone with an alternate theory is not just a heretic, but someone beneath contempt and beneath any serious efforts on your part to refute. One might call this the Krugman Effect.

At the moment, the most obvious manifestation of this phenomenon is found in the realm of economics. Take two of the country’s best economists, Ben Bernanke and Christina Romer. Both of them are students of the Great Depression. Dr. Bernanke, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, is, broadly speaking, a monetarist and Dr. Romer, former Chairwoman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, is more or less a Keynesian. Both of them have produced papers which have advanced their respective schools of thought

Anyone who has read (or in my case, tried to read) Dr. Bernanke’s book on the Depression knows that he has thought long and hard about the Great Depression and helped develop the once controversial thesis that the Federal Reserve is largely to blame for the Slump. He has been nicknamed “Helicopter Ben” for his most famous quip that one can deal with a recession by dumping baskets of dollar bills over populated places.

Dr. Romer has focused on how the Great Depression ended and one of her great insights was that Adolf Hitler was indirectly responsible for much of the economic growth between 1933 through 1937. Hitler took office two months before Franklin Roosevelt did and was such a sinister figure that massive amounts of capital almost immediately began to flee Europe in search of a safer place to invest: the United States.

But that was then and this is now. What happens when a country ceases to manufacture everyday items? All those dollars you drop from a helicopter are used primarily to buy foreign goods, doing very little to jumpstart the domestic economy but doing a good job of exporting capital overseas.

Handing out money willy nilly neglects a more holistic approach. As long as U.S. manufacturing is hamstrung by overregulation and what has become a cultural bias against manufacturing goods, any recovery will merely be the baseline for the next popped bubble. Consider the following:
• It has been many years since the route to the top of General Motors was through production. Now the CEO comes up through the ranks of Finance or Marketing. It even had a CEO who was a lawyer, whose first twenty years of his career was spent in the Midwest defending product liability suits.
• Engineering schools keep their doors open primarily by recruiting foreign students who get their education here and return home to ply their trade.
• The cream of the yearly MBA crop head for Wall Street or the consultancy business, instead of manufacturing or, better yet, entrepreneurship.

Now there’s nothing wrong with the brains of Dr. Bernanke or Dr. Romer, but their insights stay frozen in the world of theory. Once their boots hit the ground in Washington, those terrific minds lose their flexibility and when their theories crash into reality, they try to force reality to fit into their theory. Remember the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result? Well that comes dangerously close to the recommendations of our policy makers.

And although the Tea Partiers are too smart to fall into the same trap and understand that something is wrong with the theories that run the economy, their solutions are also inadequate. They don’t seem to grasp that tax and regulatory reductions are at best a partial answer. Although I am generally of the right, as an admirer of the U.S. military, the U.S. Post Office and what public schools used to be 50 years ago, I find myself uncomfortable with the anti-government rhetoric of some of them. Tax cuts are sort of beside the point anyway when we’re facing a debt mountain which will flatten us anyway.

On top of that, we have such an enormous number of people whose well-paying jobs are dependent on government – lawyers, Wall Street, government workers – that we need to change the terms of the debate without disrupting whatever is left of our economy. Clearly thinking outside of the box is necessary and it isn’t coming from anyone.
This is hardly limited to the political sphere. Everyone seems satisfied with their wretched little orthodoxies and like a bunch of crazy rural fundamentalists, they cling to them with a blindness which is frightening.

Remember Climategate, which occupied the media for about fifteen minutes, even if it only amounted to The New York Times tut-tutting that gentlemen (other than they themselves of course) don’t read other people’s mail? Prominent paleoclimatologists, faced with research from respectable scientists which contradict their favorite global warming theories, decided to ruin lives and threaten academic journals rather than to reexamine their own premises.

Time after time, in many fields of study, in the arts, in the humanities, the elites have closed their minds. The 2010’s are like the 1850’s and the 1920’s on steroids, with a reach beyond the complaisant bigotries and ignorance of politics and economics and extending into many fields of endeavor. We pushed through this intellectual barrier 80 years ago and 150 years ago, but if we don’t do it again, we will share the fate of the Roman Empire.

And a lot more quickly, too.

Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net

WHERE TO CUT DEFENSE SPENDING? HEALTH CARE? … By Dick Shriver

Whenever the defense budget is under attack to produce major cuts, most people think of eliminating expensive advanced weapons programs such as the B-2 bomber, submarines, or even eliminating thousands of troops. Gary Schmitt and Tom Donnelly, in the August 15 issue of The Weekly Standard, do mention the possibility of saving a “few billion” dollars annually by better management of such programs as the military’s health care plan, TRI-CARE for LIFE, but they greatly underestimate the magnitude of what is possible.

The US Defense Budget of nearly$700 billion in FY2011, which does not include the roughly $35 billion to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, does include $25 billion for the F-35 Strike Fighter Plane, Ballistic Missile Defense and the Virginia Class Submarine, the three largest US weapons programs today. These are juicy targets for desperate budgeteers.

A second priority is to reduce overseas troops and to reduce the number of troops on active duty in each of the services, especially in the largest (in terms of manpower), the US Army.

The trouble is, we may actually need these capabilities, and by the time we find out, it will be too late to recover such massive programs in any reasonable time. That’s not to say that the requirements justifying each of these assets is without fault; these are deservedly contentious areas worthy of discussion. Furthermore, almost all weapons systems experience huge cost overruns, thus diluting the original returns expected.

The administration, in 2009, already cut $400 billion from defense over the ensuing ten years; now it’s looking for another $500 - $600 billion over the next ten years.

It seems to me the administration wants to reduce our war-making capability. There is other low-hanging fruit to be examined, however, as is the case throughout all state, local and federal budgets: entitlements, retirement ages, and even health care.

The TRI-CARE for LIFE program is $50 billion of the US defense budget, about 12%, and applies only to military personnel and families in their peace-time capacity (medical care of wounded soldiers is not in this budget, and is quite small by comparison). It has been demonstrated that with proper incentives for patients and doctors alike, the claims paid by an insurer like TRI-CARE for LIFE could be cut in half, or more. In other words, the key to maintaining our military readiness, might be in encouraging military people, just like all other US citizens, to take better care if themselves. If this was done, and it has been done in test sites around the country, the total cost of medical insurance for the military could decrease from $50 billion to $25 billion, a savings of $25 billion a year, or $250 billion over ten years (to be sure, wellness programs require some time to build up savings, but this does not negate the argument).

Given the choice, I would rather see the relatively disciplined members of our armed services and their families keep themselves in better shape eat better, take their meds, feel better, and see fewer emergency rooms and surgeons, and at the same time, hang onto our F-35 fighter planes.

PENNY FOOLISH IN CONNECTICUT …… By Dick Shriver

The new Governor of Connecticut, Dannel P. Malloy, is raising taxes, cutting costs, eliminating government jobs and increasing budgets, all with such breathless abandon that no one quite knows in which direction the state is headed. The new governor started the year with a plan to raise existing taxes and impose new taxes on more than 60 goods and services; citizens of CT already pay state and local taxes of 12%, a staggering increase from less than 6% 20 years ago, and one of the highest state income tax rates in the nation. Malloy is also eliminating 6500 state jobs (Union? My guess: non-union). We further note that Malloy forecasts an increase in spending at the same time that he proposes to close the $1.6 billion budget gap. In other words, we’re going to try to close the gap while increasing expenditures; revenues (ie, taxes) will therefore have to increase even faster than rising expenditures to catch up, a bit like Secretariat in the stretch. This will not be fun for the citizens of Connecticut. Meanwhile, as part of his $1.6 billion gap-filler, the State is discontinuing the historic and picturesque Rocky Hill-Glastonbury and Chester-Hadlyme Ferries. This will save the state $1 million (we rounded .7 million up to 1 million) out of an annual budget of $20 billion. Is this a case of being "penny wise and pound foolish?" Or is it a case of being penny foolish as well as pound foolish?

Considering that Connecticut collected no state income taxes until 1989, going from zero to 40% of the $20 billion state budget in just a little over 20 years seems like quite a lot. The Governor’s efforts to balance the budget are laudable, but $1 million is one half of one thousandth of one percent of the budgeted $20 billion. 8 of the 6500 jobs will be eliminated if and when the ferry service ends later this month.

Concerned citizens are fighting to keep the ferries afloat. After all, there is something to be said for tradition. The Chester-Hadlyme ferry has been operating since 1769, or 242 years; the Rocky Hill-Glastonbury Ferry, however, has been working since 1655, or 356 years … the oldest ferry service in continuous operation in the United States.

There is also something to be said for tourism, one of Connecticut’s remaining business sectors, to which the ferry operations contribute. Since no one can calculate the additional revenue brought to the state because of the ferries, they have become a political football … to be kicked around to raise attention … which Malloy may have had in mind all along. It focuses the public’s attention on minutiae (one half of one thousandth of one percent qualifies as minutiae) while the good governor sets a horse race in motion with his expanding $20 billion budget. In the end, he may grant the ferries a pardon, thus appearing to be the good guy while fleecing the public out of a billion dollars or so that we simply don’t need to spend.

Finally, there is something to be said about when enough is enough. Malloy’s plan involves raising an additional $2 billion in taxes in 2012 (80% from individuals, the wealthiest of whom have already re-calculated how much they can save by changing their official residences to Florida). Need I mention that $2 billion is a whopping 10% of the $20 billion budget … vastly more than one half of one thousandth of one percent. It's the $2 billion increase that should be in the news, and the value of which we should be debating.

What are the chances that Malloy’s plan will work? That he will be able to increase revenues (taxes) fast enough to meet his budget of increasing expenditures with fewer employees, without further destroying the state’s deteriorating economy? What are the chances of another Secretariat?

Eastern Europe Votes “Republican” ….. By Dick Shriver

The responsibility of the US president is to keep its citizens safe and free. President Barack Obama is doing neither. No one recognizes more how badly our president has failed on these two basic measures than citizens of Eastern Europe. Many of them came/fled/weaseled their way to the US to escape the absence of freedom and safety in their home countries up until the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. In recent years, many young people have come to the US from Eastern Europe, armed with impeccable English (plus fluency in 3-4 other languages) and college degrees, and are outpacing their American counterparts in business schools throughout the US. Ask any of them who they would vote for as president of the US today and they would likely answer, “Any republican”, or “anyone other than Barack Obama”.

The reason is simple: Eastern Europeans know tyranny, and in the US, they recognize the signs of creeping socialism and, in their minds (and mine), the inevitable and revanchist end result of government excess and its consequence, communism and tyranny. They are incredulous at what we are doing to ourselves. They know that socialism (and worse) in the US may lead to the end of their own new-born freedom and safety.

After posting a recent blog decrying the failed Obama presidency, within hours I received messages from former students from Estonia to Romania saying how much they agreed with me; and these were students who have never studied or lived in the United States.

Conservatives amongst the coming generations in Eastern Europe may represent a majority, especially among young, college-educated professionals or business persons. Already the “republican party of Europe”, called the European People’s Party (EPP), is represented in the offices of 17 heads of state out of 27 countries in the European Union. Importantly, much of the conservative political campaign energy in Eastern Europe is derived from the firepower of educated, dedicated, patriotic, hard-working, ambitious young people.

Inside the US, it is almost not possible to find a recent emigre from Eastern Europe who voted for Obama, or who would vote for him in 2012. While these intelligent people hardly represent enough votes to make a difference in the US, what is it that they know that our own indigenous, home-grown smart people don’t know?

The answer is they remember, if not directly, then indirectly through their parents and, especially, their grandparents, what tyranny was like … and they prefer freedom and will work hard to protect it ... as hard as Americans worked for freedom during WWII. The stakes to them are more or less the same.

Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House of Representatives and now a candidate for the US presidency in 2012 recently lost most of his campaign staff; Newt, have you thought of retaining some of Eastern Europe’s conservative campaign talent?