http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-budgeting/article/108736/deficit-balloons-into-national-security-threat?sec=topStories&pos=5&asset=&ccode=
It's time to comb the rat's nest out of our hair kids.
Washington can seem to cut their spending period, let alone where it counts.
Ask yourself this, are the enormous sums paid to private military contracts now, worth the price of no military later?
Because that is what it's going to come down to eventually if not sooner. We won't be able to afford to pay for our soldiers up keep. You know, that basic part of bodies that you have to have to makeup a military and they don't work for free, and even if they did they would require basic support like food, shelter...ect.
The federal budget deficit has long since graduated from nuisance to headache to pressing national concern. Now, however, it has become so large and persistent that it is time to start thinking of it as something else entirely: a national-security threat.
The budget plan released Monday illustrates why this escalation is warranted. The numbers are mind-numbing: a $1.6 trillion deficit this year, $1.3 trillion next year, $8.5 trillion for the next 10 years combined—and that assumes Congress enacts President Barack Obama's proposals to start bringing it down, and that the proposals work.
These numbers are often discussed as an economic and domestic problem. But it's time to start thinking of the ramifications for America's ability to continue playing its traditional global role.
The U.S. government this year will borrow one of every three dollars it spends, with many of those funds coming from foreign countries. That weakens America's standing and its freedom to act; strengthens China and other world powers; puts long-term defense spending at risk; undermines the power of the American system as a model for developing countries; and reduces the aura of power that has been a great intangible asset for presidents for more than a century.
"We've reached a point now where there's an intimate link between our solvency and our national security," says Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior national-security adviser in both the first and second Bush presidencies
