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Payments on Interest to Exceed Defense Spending...
Payments on Interest to Exceed Defense Spending by $125 Billion
Daniel Halper
October 23, 2012 11:49 AM
In a decade, federal spending to pay for the interest on America's debt will exceed total spending on the defense budget by $125 billion, or 20 percent, according to projections from the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Budget Management. The projections are based on President Barack Obama's current budget plan.
Here's a chart from the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee that shows 2022 national defense spending vs. net interest payments:
In 2022, under Obama's budget, national defense spending will be $618 billion per year, while net interest payments will be $743 billion.
In fact, the interest payments are likely to be even higher, since these assumptions are based on the historically low interest rates remaining the same (which is not likely over the course of the next decade). "If interest rates rise just one percentage point above baseline projections, the government would pay an additional $1 trillion in interest payments over ten years," the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee comments.
"President Obama’s FY 2013 budget proposal has two primary impacts on fiscal policy: a $1.8 trillion increase in new taxes (twice what the White House publicly suggests) and a $1.4 trillion increase in spending above already-massive growth projections," the committee explains. "This nets a paltry $400 billion in deficit reduction over ten years, or just one-tenth of the pledged $4 trillion. As a result, America’s gross debt under the President’s plan, as reported by his own Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will rapidly climb $25.4 trillion in 2022—$10.6 trillion above where it stood at the end of 2011. In other words, the President’s core budget claim – that he has a ‘balanced’ plan to reduce the deficit – is provably and outrageously false. He raises taxes to fuel a gigantic spending increase in Washington."
Here's a chart from the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee that shows 2022 national defense spending vs. net interest payments:
In 2022, under Obama's budget, national defense spending will be $618 billion per year, while net interest payments will be $743 billion.
In fact, the interest payments are likely to be even higher, since these assumptions are based on the historically low interest rates remaining the same (which is not likely over the course of the next decade). "If interest rates rise just one percentage point above baseline projections, the government would pay an additional $1 trillion in interest payments over ten years," the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee comments.
"President Obama’s FY 2013 budget proposal has two primary impacts on fiscal policy: a $1.8 trillion increase in new taxes (twice what the White House publicly suggests) and a $1.4 trillion increase in spending above already-massive growth projections," the committee explains. "This nets a paltry $400 billion in deficit reduction over ten years, or just one-tenth of the pledged $4 trillion. As a result, America’s gross debt under the President’s plan, as reported by his own Office of Management and Budget (OMB), will rapidly climb $25.4 trillion in 2022—$10.6 trillion above where it stood at the end of 2011. In other words, the President’s core budget claim – that he has a ‘balanced’ plan to reduce the deficit – is provably and outrageously false. He raises taxes to fuel a gigantic spending increase in Washington."
Overall, his budget would increase federal spending 58% - from a budget size of $3.6 trillion today to $5.9 trillion in 2022, and increase gross federal debt by 72 percent.The result of all this debt is that interest payments on the debt are one of the fastest growing budget items. We will be borrowing money just to pay the interest on the money we’ve previously borrowed. By the year 2019, we will actually be paying more in annual interest payments than in annual defense spending. By the last year of the President’s budget, interest payments will exceed our nation’s entire defense budget by 19 percent.
Are We Becoming Medieval?
A tourist mecca like Venice now boasts that it dreams of breaking away from an insolvent Italy. Similarly Barcelona, and perhaps the Basques and the Catalonians in general, claim they want no part of a bankrupt Spain. Scotland fantasizes about becoming separate from Great Britain. The Greek Right dreams of a 19th-century Greece without Asian and African immigrants who do not look Greek. Belgium increasingly seems an artificial construct, half Flemish, half French, with the two sides never more estranged. These days Texas and California do not even seem like two parts of a united nation, just as Massachusetts is growing ever more distant from Wyoming.
Here at home, it is not just that taxation and government are different in red and blue states, or that for the last two decades national elections have hinged on what the shrinking number of purple-state voters prefer. Social and cultural questions are also dividing us, almost as much as slavery did in the 1850s. Fault lines over abortion, the role of religion, gay marriage, affirmative action, welfare, illegal immigration, and gun ownership are starting to manifest themselves regionally. We have long had the Blue–Gray game; soon will there be a Red–Blue Bowl? If Mexico plays against the U.S. soccer team in Merced, Fresno, or L.A., will the spectators root for the country in which they live or the country that they left?Europe may in the not-too-distant future end up as it was in the 16th century, before the rise of the nation state. If current trends continue, the United States may unwind in the reverse of the manner in which frontiers became territories and then states. No entity is ensured perpetual union. The process of forming nations and empires and then disassembling them back into small city states or provincial units is certainly not novel, but rather ancient, and more likely fluid and cyclical than linear — even if the process takes decades or at times centuries. When an empire or even a nation state can no longer guarantee locals that the increased security and wealth of a vast union makes it well worth transcending their parochial customs and ethnic profiles, then we have a Greece of 1,500 city states, or a medieval Europe of castles and moats.
Why is there today a nostalgia for localism? Shrinking Western populations with growing numbers of elderly and unemployed can no longer sustain their present level of redistributive taxation and entitlements. Europe, which can endure neither the disease of insolvency nor the supposed medicine of austerity, is only a decade ahead of what we should expect here in the United States, or what we see now in California — a construct more than a state, where the Central Valley is to the coast as Mississippi is to Massachusetts.
Voters are also disgusted with government, and feel that their overseers are not even subject to the consequences of what they impose on others: We expect the Obamas to trash the 1 percent as they jet to Martha’s Vineyard, or a zillionaire John Kerry to demand higher taxes as he seeks to avoid them on his yacht, or an upscale French Socialist president to have a home on the Mediterranean — or, on the other side of the ledger, social-conservative elites to speak and act like metrosexuals.
The frustration with the distant redistributive state extends beyond the technocracy to the very nature and legitimacy of the bureaucracies themselves. We know that no one trusts the National Bank of Greece or believes much in Eurobonds, but who trusts any more the GSA, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or even the Secret Service to fulfill their missions competently, and with honesty and decorum?
Nor can the redistributionist technocracy any longer make the case that its certifications, its very claims to legitimacy and entitlement — a PhD from Harvard, a JD from Yale, an MBA from Stanford — and its experience — tenure at Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, two years in OMB, a billet at the CBO, three years at the Federal Reserve — have warranted our trust. We certainly do not believe any more that such a résumé makes one a better legislator or administrator than another who has run a company, built a business, farmed, piloted a plane, or served in the military. Certainly an Al Gore or Barack Obama does not seem wise, no matter where he was educated or how many government posts he has held.
High-tech communications of the 21st century are a force multiplier, in real time conveying the failures of redistributionist schemes, through cable news, Internet blogs and tabloids, and downloaded videos. A nurse in Des Moines has the power in the palm of her hand to read the Wall Street Journal, watch a YouTube video, or browse a news site at Google, accessing more information than what the aristocratic class was privileged to obtain just a few decades ago. The result is that we see and hear instantaneously what “They” do and say, even though we rarely meet them any more in our daily lives. They have become Orwellian visages on our collective screens, whose empty platitudes seem instantaneously familiar and yet irrelevant to the people we live, work, and enjoy our leisure with.
As those who run the nation state become ever more estranged, we yearn for the safety and security of our own neighbors, who seem to think, speak, and live more as we do. In other words, we are unhappy residents of Hellenistic Greece who dream of the romance of the lost face-to-face city state, or the bread-and-circuses turba of fourth-century Rome, who feel that their fellow citizens in Gaul, Numidia, and Pontus seem hardly Roman. These days the problem is not just that an Italian wants to leave the EU, but that a Florentine or Venetian would prefer to leave Italy itself. A Texan not only wants us out of the U.N., but may feel he is already out of the U.S. Britain may want no part of the EU, but Scotland wants no part of Britain.
In terms of race and ethnicity, the classical-liberal tradition of emphasizing our character rather than our appearance has been eroded by the self-serving multiculturalism of our elites. Formal support for assimilation, intermarriage, and integration became passé, as hyphenation began to strain credulity, the “salad bowl” replaced the melting pot, and grand proclamations about the “other” became the new normal. Even as we intermarry and our popular culture blends us together, our elites tear us apart, distributing rewards and punishments in terms of jobs, entitlements, and education based on notions of difference.
Where does this all lead? Are Westerners to become Flemish against Walloons, Scots vs. Brits, and Catalonians tired of the Spanish? In our lifetime, we will certainly see the dissolution of the eurozone, and perhaps of the EU itself. At best, “Europe” may return to a common market; at worst, to the nationalism and rivalries of the first half of the 20th century. Not that the nation state itself is safe; language, locale, religion, and tradition are powerful bonds that reassert themselves once unionists fail to make the case that people are better off uniting across natural divides than fragmenting into logical enclaves.
And the United States? Are we doomed to being drawn and quartered into blue and red provinces: a postmodern Pacific Coast and New England, an Hispanic zone extending 200 miles north of the Mexican border, and a rusting Great Lakes industrial belt with its inner cities, all in loose alliance — as our red/blue Electoral College maps suggest — against the Plains states, the Rocky Mountains, and the South?
Barack Obama and his administration apparently believed that by asserting a fictitious Republican war on women, by fostering a new racial divide of “punish our enemies” and “nation of cowards,” by claiming a new economic Mason-Dixon line between the 99 percent and the suspect few who make over $250,000, and by running up $5 trillion in debt in less than four years, they could cobble together majority support for their neo-socialist agenda.
That divisiveness proved as foolish as borrowing $5 trillion to increase the number of dependent constituents. Well before Obama emerged from his Chicago organizing, there were already forces of political disunion in the West brought about by demography, globalization, and an out-of-touch technocracy — ill winds that he should have calmed rather than fanned. Indeed, Obama himself from 2002 to 2008 lectured about red/blue divides, and warned us about people like himself who would seek to exploit them for partisan advantage.
Somehow in just four years Obama has almost done to the United States what it took Brussels apparatchiks three decades to do to the European Union: alienated the people both from their technocracy and from themselves. The results could be medieval.
— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The End of Sparta, a novel about ancient freedom.
Jimmy Carter's Dead Ambassador...
He was Jimmy Carter's Ambassador to Afghanistan.
Where, on February 14, 1979, Ambassador Dubs was kidnapped and murdered by a pro-Communist Afghan faction known as the Setami Milli. The victim of what might be called the Jimmy Carter Apology Tour -- which preceded the Obama Apology Tour by over 30 years.
Ambassador Dubs' death is being recalled these days in a most interesting fashion.
Following the murder in Benghazi of Barack Obama's Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, along with two Navy Seals and Foreign Service officer Sean Smith, the Stevens murder is being frequently noted, as here in the New York Times, as "the first time since 1979 that an American ambassador had died in a violent assault."
Incredibly, after the death of Ambassador Stevens and the others, the President said flatly in last night's debate: "The Libyans stand with us." Wow. If that is true, why are the Ambassador, two Navy Seals and a Foreign Service officer dead at the hands of Libyans? The very fact that Ambassador Stevens wrote in his journal that he feared for his life clearly indicated the blanket assessment that "the Libyans stand with us" was simply not true.
There has been zero reference to Ambassador Dubs, the President whom he served -- not to mention the foreign policy that resulted in his death.
Much less is there any analysis of just why it is that the last time a United States Ambassador was murdered by a group hostile to America happens to coincide with the modern president to whom Barack Obama is most frequently compared -- Jimmy Carter.
So let's go back, shall we? Climb in the time capsule and we'll rocket back in time. Let's find out: what exactly did happen to Ambassador Adolph Dubs?
And why?
It is the night of February 14, 1979.
In Washington, President Carter is getting ready to leave for a crucial diplomatic trip to Mexico the next morning at eight o'clock sharp. Things were not well between the two countries, and Carter, who spoke Spanish, had decided to personally undertake a mission to soothe the Mexicans in the person of their president, Lopez Portillo.
On February 14, at 8:45 in the morning in Kabul -- 11:15 P.M. Washington time -- Ambassador Dubs' unguarded car was abruptly stopped by four men wearing the uniform of Kabul traffic policemen as the Ambassador traveled across Afghanistan's capital city.
At gunpoint, Spike Dubs was dragged from his car and whisked away to what was then the Hotel Kabul in the downtown section of the nation's capital. He was hustled to Room 117 and locked inside with his captors.
At 12:08 A.M. Washington time the State Department Operations Center learned of the kidnapping. By noon Kabul time the hotel was completely surrounded by the Afghan security forces.
Who were the Ambassador's kidnappers?
In the early "fog of war" the State Department first said they were "unidentified." The next day the New York Times was reporting from Pakistan that the kidnappers were something new: "right-wing Moslem terrorists" or "Moslem 'religious figures.'"
Stop.
But were they? Answer: No.
In February of 1979 the Government of Afghanistan was in the hands of pro-Soviet Communists -- specifically the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan or PDPA. The PDPA, with an assist from the Afghan army, had taken power in a violent 1978 coup d'état. In fact, the Ambassador's kidnappers proved eventually to be members of a rival Communist faction to the PDPA -- the Maoist "Setami Milli."
The Setami Milli was insisting the PDPA had arrested and was holding its leader, one Badruddin Bahes. The PDPA government, begged by the U.S. Embassy to negotiate for the life of its Ambassador, refused.
What to do? The President was scheduled to leave for Mexico this very morning at eight. An American Ambassador was suddenly a hostage. Tensions rose inside the White House.
The Soviet Union was already on hand in Kabul with "advisers" and, it turned out, had begun to "advise" the Afghan security forces. The Afghan police. The advice? The Afghans were to mount an assault on the hotel room.
Tensions kept rising.
Suddenly, out of the blue, another call came into the State Department Operations Center. And it wasn't from Afghanistan.
At 2:15 A.M. a U.S. Marine at the American Embassy in Tehran, Iran, called to report that, in the words of the Times, there were "crowds converging on the embassy." There was the possibility of an attack. U.S. Ambassador William H. Sullivan was inside the embassy -- and abruptly the Carter White House had not one but two Ambassadors in very real danger. And in Iran, the entire Embassy was vulnerable.
The Marine was put on speakerphone, the sounds from Tehran booming through the Operations Center's loud speakers. The sound of machine gun fire was suddenly heard -- coming from the swarming crowds outside the Embassy gates. At 3 A.M. the line to the American Embassy in Iran went dead.
In the White House, Jimmy Carter was awakened by a 3:00 A.M. phone call from his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. Vance, wrote Carter in his diary, had news "concerning a difficulty with our Iranian embassy."
Twenty minutes later, at 3:20 A.M. word came in from Kabul. The Afghan police, advised by the Soviets, their pro-Soviet government refusing to negotiate with the competing Maoist Setami Milli, had rushed the hotel.
In the cross fire between pro-Soviet Communists and Maoist Communists, Ambassador Dubs was shot to death.
Jimmy Carter, ready to depart the White House for Mexico at 8:00 in the morning, was furious.
The discussion was held: should the Mexican trip be canceled?
Through the diplomatic good graces of the British and Danish embassies, the Ayatollah Khomeini had agreed to help the Americans trapped in the American Embassy. At 6 A.M. Washington time came the word from Tehran. The forces loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini had, in the words of the Times, "promised to do all they could for the Americans." The attack on the embassy magically ceased.
Jimmy Carter left for Mexico on schedule at eight that morning.
In the course of the next few days Ambassador Dubs' body was flown home to the United States. He was given a hero's burial at Arlington National Cemetery attended by Vice President Mondale and First Lady Rosalynn Carter.
What to do about the mess in Afghanistan?
Jimmy Carter instructed his State Department to file a "strong protest" (in the words of the Times) with the Soviet-backed Afghan government. The Soviet Ambassador to the United States was summoned to the State Department. Where Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was treated to his usual privilege of avoiding the front entrance of State and those pesky reporters in favor of being driven into the State Department's underground garage. Where the Soviet Ambassador was, again as usual, escorted to the private elevator of the Secretary of State for his ride up into the building. Once inside, Carter's State Department informed the Soviet Ambassador that they were making a "formal protest" to the Soviet government over the killing of Spike Dubs. The actions of the Soviets were "impossible to justify," said State.
Thus admonished, Dobrynin took the Secretary's private elevator back to the garage and departed.
The response from the Soviet government? The Soviet news agency Tass put out an indignant statement denying responsibility. The other Communists in this set piece, the Setami Milli, were eventually rewarded when the Soviet-backed government made a Setami Milli leader the Minister of Justice.
And when Jimmy Carter got to Mexico? He was promptly, humiliatingly and quite publicly reprimanded by President Portillo for his policies toward Mexico. Carter was so angry he was reported to have instructed aides that he never wanted to see Portillo again.
In short: February of 1979 proved to be a bad month for Jimmy Carter's foreign policy. In fact, it proved fatal for Ambassador Spike Dubs.
But why?
AND WHAT DOES THE MURDER of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi in 2012 have to do with the murder of Ambassador Adolph "Spike" Dubs some 33 years earlier?
Indeed, no one is asking why it is that both Obama and Carter -- not Reagan or the Bushes or Bill Clinton -- wound up having an American enemy think it was safe to kill an American Ambassador.
There is a reason. And it certainly is appropriate to suggest that the reason has to do with the similarity in conducting foreign policy exemplified by both Presidents Carter and Obama.
Let's start with Carter.
On May 22, 1977, the new American President Carter traveled to the University of Notre Dame where he gave a speech in which he proclaimed:
We are now free of that inordinate fear of Communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.Over the next three years Carter repeatedly sent signals to the Communist world -- and unwittingly, to the Muslim world -- that:
Our goal is to be fair to both sides, to produce reciprocal stability, parity, and security.The results? By 1979, the world was in chaos.
• On January 16, 1979, the Shah of Iran fled his country.
• On February 1, 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to establish the Islamic Republic of Iran.
• On February 14, 1979, the American Ambassador to Afghanistan Adolph Dubs is kidnapped and murdered by the Setami Milli, a Maoist faction of Afghan Communists.
• On July 19, 1979, the Communist Sandinistas took control of the capital of Nicaragua.
• On November 4, 1979, Iranian Islamic radicals, students, stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran. This time Khomeini did not interfere, the radical Islamics taking 52 American diplomats hostage. They would be held for 444 days.
• On December 24, 1979, the Soviet Union, no longer content to simply have advisers on scene, invaded Afghanistan. Carter pronounced himself "shocked."
In three short years -- from his inaugural in January of 1977 until the close of 1979 -- Jimmy Carter's foreign policy had turned the world upside down, making it a cauldron of Communist revolution and invasion.
Long before Barack Obama, it was Carter who led the original Apology Tour. The result? The Cold War did not cool down, it heated up.
And it is decidedly worth noting that when Obama dismissed Romney's thinking on Russia by saying "the Cold War has been over for 20 years" -- when it was up to Jimmy Carter (not to mention even or especially Carter's 1980 primary opponent the late Senator Ted Kennedy -- Obama's major supporter in 2008) -- liberals of the day demanded America follow a policy that would have kept the Cold War alive and well to this day. When Ronald Reagan defeated Carter, liberals spent the rest of the Cold War vociferously protesting Reagan's successful efforts to win it. Now they boast that it's over, as if their thinking and decades of blundering, costly policies have somehow been vindicated -- and should be repeated.
And the same exact approach Carter employed with the Communist world was applied to the Islamic revolutionaries in Iran -- unleashing the Islamic fundamentalist whirlwind on the world.This time around the problem is another American president -- Barack Obama. And unsurprisingly, in his September 4th video address to the Democrats in their Charlotte Convention, it was Jimmy Carter who claimed Obama was seen as a "leader among nations."
Said the man who led and left the world in chaos in his single term:
Overseas President Obama has restored the reputation of the United States within the world community. Dialogue and collaboration are once again possible with the spirit of trust and goodwill in our foreign policy.Seven days later, Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered by Islamic terrorists.
And the Middle East was in flames, with violent protests breaking out throughout the world.
Why was this happening? And happening again?
Because one more time an American president has led with weakness. With policies that Romney last night correctly labeled a "rising tide of chaos." Chaos. The main link that ties the results of the Carter and Obama policies so tightly together.
• By ostentatiously signing the order to close Guantanamo -- and being unable to keep his promises.
• By releasing a video addressed to the Iranian mullahs asking for a Carteresque "new beginning" in the American relationship with Iran "that is honest and grounded in mutual respect," enabling Iran to "take its rightful place in the community of nations… [not] through terror or arms, but rather through peaceful actions that demonstrate the true greatness of the Iranian people and civilization." In response, Iran continues its work to get a nuclear weapon.
• By insisting his administration replace the word "terrorism" (and others) terms like "man-caused disaster" because, as Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano put it in an interview in Der Spiegel:
… In my speech, although I did not use the word "terrorism," I referred to "man-caused" disasters. That is perhaps only a nuance, but it demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear toward a policy of being prepared for all risks that can occur.• By going to Cairo University and making the Obama equivalent of Carter's "inordinate fear of Communism" Notre Dame speech. Saying, among other things:
… I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.
• By telling his then-Russian counterpart, the outgoing President Dmitri Medvedev to tell Vladimir Putin: "This is my last election. After my election, I'll have more flexibility." To which Romney said of Putin in last night’s debate: "After the election he'll get more backbone" in dealing with Obama.
• By remaining silent as the Iranian people tried to stand up for their freedoms in the "Green Revolution" -- against the very Iranian mullahs who helped end Jimmy Carter’s presidency. Time after time after time Obama has sent signals of weakness to the world.
In 1979 that foreign policy resulted in the death of Spike Dubs. In 2012, the Ambassador who wound up murdered was Chris Stevens.
What was Carter's answer when he finally faced off with Ronald Reagan in 1980? Carter and his allies tried to paint Reagan as a not very smart warmonger. A dangerous man.
But perhaps with Spike Dubs on his mind, five days after the Ambassador's murder Reagan grimly told an audience in Ohio:
I'm beginning to wonder if the symbol of the United States pretty soon isn't going to be an ambassador with a flag under his arm climbing into the escape helicopter.This is now the exact same tactic of the Obama campaign with Mitt Romney. With the Obama foreign policy disintegrating, they are trying to paint Romney as a not very smart guy and a warmonger.
The problem?
Just like Jimmy Carter, a dead Ambassador has become a symbol of Obama's failed foreign policy.
And there is a reason for it.
That reason? The Obama foreign policy is being conducted exactly like the Carter foreign policy. The Carter Apology Tour, from a speech about the "inordinate fear of communism" to slapping the wrists of the Soviets over the death of Ambassador Dubs to the Iranian hostage crisis, sent a message and produced results, all of them bad. Or, as Romney said last night about the Obama foreign policy in words that echoed the sentiments of Reagan about Carter's foreign policy: "I don't see our influence growing around the world -- I see our influence receding."
It is receding indeed.
To the background appeasement music of Neville Chamberlain's tapping umbrella.
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