GOP's Military Mindset Follows Russian Recipe for Disaster
Republicans talk a good game when it comes to belt-tightening, austerity and living within our means. But this vote and others like it prove it's nothing but a smokescreen. The GOP's agenda isn't to balance the budget, it's to eliminate any significant funding for domestic programs and funnel it into the military.
Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican point man on the economy and a potential vice presidential pick, isn't hiding any of this. He's right up front about it:
The automatic cuts, he said, "would decimate our military at the very moment when our men and women are over fighting in Afghanistan. So what we're saying is we don't want to lose the savings. We just need to cut the government spending in other places of government."
In other words: Let's gut social programs to maintain (and increase) military spending.
Gutting domestic programs to strengthen the military is exactly what the Soviet Union did. And look how that ended up. Or for a more contemporary example, look at North Korea, which spends more than one-third of its gross domestic product on defense while its population is among the world's most impoverished. As many as 3.5 million North Koreans died of starvation during a famine in the 1990s.
Read the full story at The Provocation.