Alan Grayson : How to Save $2 Trillion

There are 23 million Americans who can’t find full-time work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

There are 50 million Americans who can’t see a doctor when they are sick, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

There are more than 15 million American families who owe more on their mortgage than their homes are worth, according to Zillow. That’s almost a third of all the families who own homes.

If I were in Congress right now, these are the problems that I would be trying to solve.

But instead, we see a bizarre preoccupation — no, really, an obsession — with cutting federal benefits. Some kind of weird contest to see who can inflict the most pain on the American people. With the proponent of each new sadistic plan announcing proudly, “mine is bigger than yours.”

I’ll be honest — the federal deficit for the year 2021 is not something that I spend a lot of time thinking about these days. But let’s assume — arguendo, as they used to say back in Ancient Rome — that for some reason, there were some compelling, emergency need to work out how to cut $2 trillion from projected federal budget deficits over the next ten years.

I have an idea about how to do that. It’s a very simple idea. In fact, I can sum it up in one word, with five letters:

PEACE.

Now, I know that peace may not be as popular as it used to be. The polling is very iffy. The focus groups are mixed. But let’s look at the facts.

Last year, we spent $154 billion in appropriated funds on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is in addition to the $549 billion in appropriated funds for the Pentagon — you know, just to keep the lights on. And the non-appropriated cost of war was even higher — especially when you include the cost of care for the 15% of all the American troops in Iraq who come home with permanent brain abnormalities. According to Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz, the war in Iraq alone is costing us $4 trillion and counting. That’s more than $13,000 for every one of us, and roughly 8% of our entire net worth as a nation.

The cost of war is enormous. So enormous that, as I pointed out in H.R. 5353, The War is Making You Poor Act, if we simply funded that cost through the Pentagon’s own budget, rather than through supplemental appropriations, we could eliminate taxes on everyone’s first $35,000 of income ($70,000 for married couples), and still reduce the deficit by more than $10 billion a year.

And that was last year. Since then, the number of wars has gone up by 50%.

This is what Pat Buchanan — of all people, Pat Buchanan — said two weeks ago:

The United States is strategically over-extended, worldwide. What are we doing borrowing money from Japan to defend Japan. Borrow money from Europe to defend Europe. Borrow money from the Persian Gulf to defend the Persian Gulf. This country is over-extended. It is an empire and the empire is coming down.

You say that you want to save $2 trillion in ten years? It’s simple: end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and end whatever it is that they are calling it now in Libya. I’d rather do that than throw Granny from the train.

But that’s just me.

Guns or butter. It’s not a new choice.

I prefer butter.

What about you?