Chicken little......

A sample of headlines on the web this afternoon

 • Napolitano: Cuts will make US more vulnerable to terrorist attack
 • Obama urges budget cuts 'compromise'
 • Armed Services Republicans scramble to avoid defense cuts
 • Navy warns sequester cuts will put off repairs to a dozen warships
 • Obama appeals to governors for help in battle over sequester cuts

Of course every agency is claiming the sky will fall if their budget is cut, and every agency is predicting the direst possible consequences (little children will starve, teachers will be thrown out of work, there will be no air traffic control, terrorists will take over the nation, etc, etc.).

Notice that no one says anything about cutting Congressional staff or reducing Congressional pay, or closing redundant military bases, or furloughing senior civil servants, or reducing the bloated Pentagon support staff, or eliminating special interest subsidies.

Nor does anyone seem to care that we are still borrowing almost half of every dollar the government spends.

Yes, this is a dumb way to reduce our spending. It would be much smarter to ramp it down slowly, and with rational discussion about what the real priorities are. But given today’s politics, the clout that special interest have because of their financial contributions to campaigns, and the natural tenancy of government agencies to fight to preserve all of their budgets and then some, we don’t seem to be able to take the rational route. So better to cut stupidly than not at all.

Recommended: Hellfire, Morality and Strategy

George Freidman  of STRATFOR writes amazingly good analyses of current political events. His recent piece Hellfire, Morality and Strategy deals with the issue of killing jihadists from unmanned aerial vehicles, which is suddenly a hot topic of discussion these days. In a closely reasoned  piece, he argues that such killings are probably legal in international law, based on the existing conventions of war, because the jihadists don't identify themselves as soldiers  and hide among civilians. He argues that it may well be moral as well (excepting those who don't think any war is moral), considering that we face an implacable enemy who is determined to destroy us, and doesn't care how many civilians get killed in the process.

But he does question whether it is an effective strategy in the long run.  Here are two quotes from the piece that summarize his arguments well:.

The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative the the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible.  From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.

and

The problem of unmanned aerial vehicles is that they are so effective from the U.S.point of view that they have become the weapon of first resort. Thus, the United States is being drawn into operations in new areas with what appears to be little cost.  In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible.  At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be worn with Hellfire missiles.  A strategy of mitigation using airstrikes is possible, but such a campaign must not become geographically limitless.  Unmanned areal vehicles lead to geographical limitlessness.  That is their charm; that is their danger.

Quote of the week

"Technology is at its best when it is invisible. I am convinced that technology is of greatest benefit when it displaces the deleterious, unnatural, alienating, and, most of all, inherently fragile preceding technology."

Nassim Teleb, "Antifragile"

It's a puzzle

President Obama's second inaugural address was pretty much a potboiler, long on rhetoric and very short indeed on specifics. He carried his first inaugural address on the sheer force of his oratory, but that is wearing thin now, at least with me. But then, inaugural addresses are ephemeral things generally.

Now the State of the Union address is usually expected to be something better - the president is expected, certainly just after his inauguration, to lay out his plans for his next term. That is what puzzles me. What he laid out was a liberal wish list that he has to know has little chance of passing the Republican House or even the Democratic Senate. He may get a few things, like modest immigration reform and some sort of token gun restrictions, but the rest of his wish list is pure fantasy, completely unaffordable in a nation already borrowing almost half of each year's federal budget. And what was conspicuously absent - again - was any plan at all to address the federal deficit or the ballooning federal debt.

 Readers of this blog will already know that I am deeply disappointed in the President - a constitutional lawyer who has repeatedly ignored constitutional limits (think recess appointments, or more recently the assertion that he has the right to kill any American he deems a threat, or anyone else, anywhere in the world with drones, on his own orders, without any oversight or judicial proceedings). But more fundamentally, I am appalled that he still hardly ever acknowledges the huge deficit, and certainly hasn't done anything to help it and much to make it worse. What can he be thinking??

Yes, but.....

Predictably, everyone is up in arms at the possibility of some cuts in the federal budget. President Obama is asking Congress not to allow the sequester cuts (already delayed a couple of months) to occur, but has thus far proposed no alternative plan to deal with the ballooning debt.

Of course the cuts will be painful. People will lose their jobs or take significant pay cuts (including perhaps even members of my own family). Companies will lose federal business, especially the defense industries. Painful? Yes. But what is the alternative? Borrow and borrow and borrow until finally the whole system crashes? That would/will be far more painful.

Any rational system would have seen this coming years ago when there was still time to cut back slowly, allow normal attrition to reduce the workforce, and mitigate the inevitable pain in all sorts of ways. The longer we go without addressing the problem, the more intractable and painful the inevitable adjustment will be. This isn't rocket science!

Unfortunately, there seems little hope that either the administration or Congress will be at all rational about this. No doubt we will see a cliff-hanger last-minute resolution which once again doesn't address the real problem. Perhaps there will be a few cosmetic cuts (probably mostly accounting tricks, just like all the other cuts recently). Perhaps there will be a few token revenue increases. But I see little hope that this administration, this Congress, or either of the two parties we currently have in this country will make any of the hard choices that rationally need to be made.

Well, in the end they are there because we voted them in, so the probably very painful consequences will be on the heads of ourselves, the American voters. We get the government we deserve!