The Romney Welfare State
by digby
This morning on This Week, Krugman and Rand Paul went back and forth on Romney's "weaponized Keynesianism" and agreed that it was hypocritical. (Baby steps ...) And it's true that the Romney campaign is out there fearmongering about job losses from Obama's phantom "defense cuts."
Will Saletan at Slate wrote a story about this on Friday:
Mitt Romney has launched a flurry of new TV ads explaining how he’ll protect and create jobs: more government spending.
The ads, available on Romney’s YouTube channel, are tailored to eight swing states. The one running in Virginia, near me, says: “Here in Virginia, we’re not better off under President Obama. His defense cuts threaten over 130,000 jobs—lowering home values, putting families at risk.” Similar ads in other states complain that Obama’s reductions in military spending threaten 20,000 jobs in Colorado, 20,000 in Ohio, and “thousands more” in Florida and North Carolina.
Romney promises to save these jobs by shielding the Pentagon budget. Here’s his pitch in Virginia: “Romney’s plan? Reverse Obama defense cuts. Strengthen our military, and create over 340,000 new jobs for Virginia.”
This really takes some chutzpah coming from the "we built that" people. You can parse it a number of ways and I'm sure they'll say they aren't promising to create 340,000 new defense jobs, but you can forgive voters for thinking that's what he's saying.
Romney has been talking up the military and the defense industry as an employment haven for weeks. On Aug. 14, he warned that looming defense cuts would “threaten 150,000 defense-related jobs” in Virginia. A week later, his new running mate, Paul Ryan, declared that the cuts “could put almost 44,000 jobs at stake right here in Pennsylvania. We're not going to let that happen.” In North Carolina, Ryan said he and Romney opposed the cuts because “we don't want to trade small-business jobs for military jobs. We want more jobs across the board.” And last week, Romney protested that under the cuts, “up to 1.5 million jobs could be lost. GDP growth could fall significantly.”
For the most part, the cuts to which Romney has objected are automatic. It’s perfectly sensible to argue that military spending should be reduced instead in a more targeted, deliberate way. But Romney doesn’t propose such targeted reduction. He rejects it. In last week’s speech, he pledged:
The Obama administration is set to cut defense spending by nearly a trillion dollars. My administration will not. Working together with my running mate, Paul Ryan, I will make reductions in other areas and install pro-growth policies to make sure that our country remains safe and secure. There are plenty of places to cut in a federal budget that now totals well over $3 trillion a year, but defense is not one of them.
In an interview with Fortune last month, Romney said he would use any savings in the Pentagon budget not to reduce the deficit but “to increase the number of active-duty personnel by approximately 100,000, to restore our military equipment which has been destroyed in conflict, and to invest in the coming technologies of warfare.” What’s more, in his 2012 budget proposal, Ryan allocated more money for defense than the Pentagon requested, arguing, “We don’t think the generals are giving us their true advice.”
Earlier I mused about the possibility that the GOP will become dovish in Obama's second term and wondered how anti-war lefties might leverage that if it came to pass. My reasoning wasn't based on any illusions that the Republicans were reverting to their old pre-commie isolationism, but rather partisan advantage. I think this proves it.
The Democrats are very competent stewards of the Authoritarian National Security States and some of them show a real flare for the creepiest covert stuff. But they are still amateurs in comparison to the GOP. Ostentatious, aggressive Military hegemony is absolutely central to their plans, economically as well as philosophically. What a choice.
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