{"id":9394,"date":"2011-04-22T13:44:04","date_gmt":"2011-04-22T17:44:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=9394"},"modified":"2011-04-22T13:44:04","modified_gmt":"2011-04-22T17:44:04","slug":"growth-in-entitlements-kills-defense-capabilities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/9394\/growth-in-entitlements-kills-defense-capabilities\/","title":{"rendered":"Growth in Entitlements Kills Defense Capabilities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Byron York continues <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtonexaminer.com\/politics\/2011\/04\/reforming-entitlements-key-strong-military \" target=\"_blank\">sounding a lone alarm<\/a> over the connection between ballooning welfare spending and shrinking defense budgets.\u00a0 With the United States largely abstaining from the lethal aspects of NATO\u2019s Libyan adventure, entitlement-heavy countries like Britain and France are running out of missiles.<\/p>\n<p>The reason?\u00a0 Decades of budget decisions that favored butter over guns.<\/p>\n<p>On a trip to Libya, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtonexaminer.com\/politics\/2011\/04\/mccain-risk-averse-nato-losing-ground-libya\" target=\"_blank\">reopens the straight talk express<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201c&#8230;it&#8217;s a sobering fact that many NATO countries, even some of the big ones, are simply weak. They&#8217;ve been cutting their defense budgets for years as their welfare state commitments grew bigger and bigger. Now, they can&#8217;t mount much of a fight, even by the small-scale standards of the Libyan action. &#8220;No one will admit it, but both the British and the French are running out of precision-guided weapons,&#8221; says McCain. &#8220;They simply do not have the assets.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Not that this evidence is convincing to modern liberals.\u00a0 York also points out that members of Congress\u2019 Progressive Caucus recently proposed a <a href=\"http:\/\/washingtonexaminer.com\/politics\/2011\/04\/liberals-plan-gut-defense-and-tax-tax-tax\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cPeople\u2019s Budget\u201d<\/a> that raises taxes to expand entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while &#8220;reducing strategic capabilities, conventional forces, procurement, and research &amp; development programs.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>We\u2019ve seen the future, and it\u2019s the near military impotence of Britain and France.\u00a0 The United States can and must do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Byron York continues sounding a lone alarm over the connection between ballooning welfare spending and shrinking defense budgets.\u00a0 With the United States largely abstaining from the lethal aspects of NATO\u2019s Libyan adventure, entitlement-heavy countries like Britain and France are running out of missiles. The reason?\u00a0 Decades of budget decisions that favored butter over guns. On [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[405,70,645,95,1836,721,2436,588,125,826,61],"class_list":["post-9394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-britain","tag-budget","tag-byron-york","tag-entitlements","tag-france","tag-john-mccain","tag-libya","tag-national-defense","tag-nato","tag-security","tag-spending"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9394"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9398,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9394\/revisions\/9398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}