Barney, Frankly Part 2

More Barney Frank in our public discourse, please.  Frank at Davos:

So, what hard choices could be made to avert a government debt crisis, at least in America? In his State of the Union speech a few hours later, Obama would call for a three-year government spending freeze, not including national security spending or key entitlements. But Rep. Barney Frank, who attended the Davos session as one of the selected "challengers" for the three presenters, called for large cuts in defense spending as well as tax increases -- particularly on wealthy Davos types. "I think almost every American here pays much less in taxes than you ought to. I'm going to go back and try to raise the taxes of most of the people who attended here," Frank vowed.

Then again as Katrina vanden Heuvel notes, Barney Frank's been talking defense cuts for a very, very long time.

The math is compelling: if we do not make reductions approximating 25 percent of the military budget starting fairly soon, it will be impossible to continue to fund an adequate level of domestic activity even with a repeal of Bush's tax cuts for the very wealthy.

I am working with a variety of thoughtful analysts to show how we can make very substantial cuts in the military budget without in any way diminishing the security we need. I do not think it will be hard to make it clear to Americans that their well-being is far more endangered by a proposal for substantial reductions in Medicare, Social Security or other important domestic areas than it would be by canceling weapons systems that have no justification from any threat we are likely to face.

So those organizations, editorial boards and individuals who talk about the need for fiscal responsibility should be challenged to begin with the area where our spending has been the most irresponsible and has produced the least good for the dollars expended--our military budget. Both parties have for too long indulged the implicit notion that military spending is somehow irrelevant to reducing the deficit and have resisted applying to military spending the standards of efficiency that are applied to other programs. If we do not reduce the military budget, either we accustom ourselves to unending and increasing budget deficits, or we do severe harm to our ability to improve the quality of our lives through sensible public policy. 

And this is why anyone who talks of fiscal conservatism without demanding we cut trillions from our defense budget is full of shit.  That basically includes every Republican in Washington (and a fair number of Dems to boot.)