Trying to balance the budget through defense cuts is both counterproductive and impossible.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There is a difficult leap between talking about balancing the budget and actually doing it.
Our priority must be to build a path towards balancing the budget, and we cannot tolerate growing deficits.
When you cut a half-a-trillion dollars from the defense budget, it affects almost every area in the defense budget.
Balancing a nominal budget will solve nothing, and attempting to achieve such a spurious balance will produce much mischief.
Monetary policy itself cannot sensibly be directed at reducing imbalances.
If you refuse to acknowledge that there is any waste that can be culled from the military budget, you are a big-government conservative, and you cannot lay claim to balancing the budget.
We cannot allow anything that's called 'national defense' to justify any and all spending. We need to be very, very careful that we don't overspend and say, 'Oh, that's defense,' when perhaps it isn't.
There is no real justification for a requirement that a budget of any sort should be balanced, except as a rallying point for those who seek to hamstring government.
Cutting budget deficits can never be just an exercise in economics.
If we can't find cuts in the defense budget, we're not looking carefully enough.